PUBLICATIONS & Works-In-Progress
Co-authored with Irene Miano
While existing commentary on the Climate Change Advisory Opinion has, for the most part, concentrated on the content of the Opinion – the meaning of its 457 paragraphs spread across 133 pages, our intervention begins elsewhere. Rather than interrogating what the International Court of Justice had to say, we turn our attention to how the Court said what it had to say. In other words, we take the form of the Opinion as our analytical point of departure.
In so doing, we follow the work of legal ethnographers and international lawyers who have explored the forms and technicalities, the rhetorical and literary genres, and the artistic and paratextual elements of international lawyering – the material, semiotic, epistemic, and aesthetic practices which render texts judicially meaningful and recognizable as law. Our aim in turning to the form of the Opinion as our analytical register is to show how it shapes the possibilities of international lawyering and what this reveals about the struggles of international (climate) law.
Völkerrechtsblog 9 March 2026 https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/the-absent-present/
Keywords: ICJ, Climate Change, Advisory Opinion, Legal Form
Thinking with the ‘Planetary Mine’: The Jurisprudence of Global Commerce in the New Climatic Regime
Part of a symposium on Legal Genealogies of Global Commerce
The jurisprudence of global commerce has, traditionally, structured itself with reference to the political and economic logic of globalisation. Within this paradigm, it is global markets, inter-governmental regimes, and transnational networks of communication, logistics, and finance that function as primary reference points. In the ‘new climatic regime’, or the contested ‘Anthropocene’, however, the ‘globe of globalisation’ has also become the ‘globe of global warming’. Here, it is emissions accumulating in the atmosphere, and their interaction with the Earth’s bio-geo-chemical systems, that unsettle the conditions which make life on this planet possible. What might it mean for a jurisprudence of global law to engage with planetarity? And which sensibilities does the planet instil in, and evacuate from, jurisprudential analysis?
This paper takes the notion of the ‘planetary mine’ as its entry point to think through these questions. Developed by political geographers Mazen Labban and Martín Arboleda, it conceptually describes the globally interconnected nature of capitalist resource extraction. From this perspective, the planetary mine emerges as an assemblage of economic, political, technological, as well as geological and ecological processes.
The paper begins by tracing how modern conceptions of the planet emerged during the course of the 20thcentury. Using this historical account to develop a diagnosis of the present, the paper identifies three challenges which the planet poses to the jurisprudence of global commerce: temporal and spatial dislocations, the interrelatedness-and-otherness of humans in relation to their ecological contexts, and possibilities of forming political collectives.
