Professor Frank leads panel on trends in climate-change litigation

On Sept. 10, Professor Environmental Practice Rick Frank moderated and led a California Lawyers Association/Environmental Law Section-sponsored virtual panel discussion, “Tracking Current Trends and Future Opportunities in American Climate Change Litigation.”

The program analyzed what Frank identified as the three most important climate-change litigation initiatives currently pending in the United States: the Juliana case being litigated in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; the numerous lawsuits filed in California and throughout the nation by state and local governments against major energy companies, seeking compensation for climate-change-related harm to those jurisdictions attributable to the companies’ greenhouse-gas-emitting products; and the State of California’s leadership in numerous multi-state lawsuits against the Trump administration, challenging the White House’s multifaceted attempted rollbacks of federal programs to limit climate change and reduce America’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

Richard M. Frank ’74 is a leader in the field of environmental law, Professor of Environmental Practice and the founding director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center at UC Davis School of Law.