About the author

Riccardo Fornasari is Maître de Conférences (assistant professor) at the University of Paris Dauphine - PSL. Previously, he has been an attaché temporaire d’enseignement et recherche at the University of Paris Nanterre, a post-doc researcher at the University of Bologna, and he holds a Phd degree in private law from the University of Bologna and at the University of Paris Nanterre. He has earned an LL.M (with distinction) from the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. After having carried on extensive research on the relationship between contract law and political economy, his current research interests focus on the relationship between private law, climate change and political economy.

Abstract

In his intervention, Fornasari analyzes the impact of climate change litigation on the structure of private law, contributing to an understanding of its transformative potential and limitations. He argues that climate change litigation disrupts the homology between the commodity form and the legal form, resulting in a surprisingly antisystemic effect. In developing this argument, Fornasari makes three distinct contributions. First, he demonstrates that the legal form of climate change litigation is incompatible with the rationale of capital accumulation. Second, he updates Pašukanis’s commodity form theory of law to conceptualize the transformations in European private law systems that have been evolving over recent decades, tentatively labeling this as “private law for the age of monopoly capitalism” (PLAMC). Third, he contends that climate change litigation diverges from the rationale of PLAMC, noting that in these cases, the legal form does not replicate the commodity form. This rare dissociation, he suggests, creates antisystemic potential. Fornasari concludes with observations on the legal form of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.

Practicalities 

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