Professor Dr. Ingo Venzke
University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Date: 15.10.2025, 6:00 p.m.
Venue: Room L623, 6th floor | Faculty of Law | Sigmund Freud University | Lassallestraße 3, 1020 Vienna
Ten years after the Paris Agreement was concluded in 2015, global climate law finds itself at a juncture that seems paradoxical: despite proliferating treaties, litigation, and regulatory frameworks, emissions continue to rise. The talk interrogates this dissonance, asking why the law, hailed as a beacon of hope in the climate crisis, so often falls short of its transformative promise. It argues that legal scholarship must shift its gaze beyond the celebrated law that might come to the rescue—climate litigation, rights of nature, or proposals to establish the crime of ecocide—to the structural complicity of law in sustaining fossil capitalism.
The talk introduces the concept of fossil sovereignty to capture the dense web of legal norms that legitimize, protect, and perpetuate the extraction, trade, and combustion of fossil fuels. Far from being a neutral instrument, over decades law the has become a central mechanism of path dependency, shielding carbon-intensive practices. Against the urgency of crisis thinking, the talk advocate slowing down to scrutinize the ambivalent role of law: both as a site of contestation and as a barrier to climate justice. Only by exposing and dismantling fossil sovereignty can legal reform move beyond disappointment and contribute meaningfully to averting catastrophic climate breakdown. There are some signs on the horizon that legal thought and practice is picking up that task.
(The talk builds on a book project under the same title, co-authored together with Jochen von Bernstorff.).
Please register until 14.10.2025: konrad.lachmayer@jus.sfu.ac.at
Biography
Ingo Venzke is Professor for International Law and Social Justice at the University of Amsterdam where he directs the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and leads the collaborative research project on Sustainable Global Economic Law (SGEL).
His publications include Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (OUP 2021, with Kevin Jon Heller), In Whose Name? A Public Law Theory of International Adjudication (OUP 2014, with Armin von Bogdandy) and How Interpretation Makes International Law: On Semantic Change and Normative Twists (OUP 2012), which won the Book Prize of the European Society of International Law. His public writing includes the essay on Tragedy & Farce in Climate Commentary in the European Review of Books (2023).
Ingo was Editor-in-Chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law (2015-2024) and a Fellow at The New Institute (2021/22).
He currently finalizes a monograph on “Fossil Sovereignty: The Struggle for Law in the Climate Crisis” (together with Jochen von Bernstorff).
The Discussion Group on Comparative Constitutional Law and Theory is organised by Prof. Konrad Lachmayer and Dr. Andreas Orator at the Sigmund Freud Private University, Faculty of Law, in Vienna.