Papaux, Alain

Climate trials: The magistrate (back) at the heart of law - 2019.


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Climate trials are often based on the General Principles, which, by their vague nature, de facto delegate the substance of environmental law to the magistrate, whose voice then becomes almost existential. Such gravity is already understood in “pollution”, which originally refers to the desecration of the sacred; in its word then resonates an entire anthropology of human rights threatened by the “actions by omission” of the human being himself. It also revives the sacred spring of politics: the self-foundation of institutions, in the style of J.-J. Rousseau. But the entry into Anthropocene forced him to reconfigure freedom.