Telling Meaningful Stories About Climate Change and Public Law

Current scholarly discourse is dominated by stories about the role of strategic litigation as a mechanism for forcing public action in relation to climate change. While such stories are satisfying, they are not necessarily meaningful because they narrow the intellectual field of vision. By using an essay by Ursula Le Guin on narrative forms, I show that other more meaningful narratives are possible to tell. Narratives that encompass a bigger picture and, in so doing, draw attention to how public law is a resource for the institutional and reasoning capacity required for responding to the polycentric and multivalent nature of climate change. Such capacity does not provide a ‘solution’ to climate change but does underscore the need to foster legal and scholarly expertise and imagination in relation to climate change and public law.