The closures of legal subjectivity: why examining ‘law’s person’ is critical to an understanding of injustice in an age of climate crisis

This Chapter suggests that sustained reflection on the patterns and history of climate injustice reveal that the role, function and constitution of legal subjectivity is fundamental to the genesis of the climate crisis: that legal subjectivity operationalizes an assumed order of priority (a socio-juridical hierarchy) between human beings, between human beings and non-human animals, between human beings and the ecosystems – and so forth. The Chapter explores the idea that the climate crisis itself is as much a crisis of human hierarchy mediated by the dominant legal order, as it is a crisis in the ‘natural order’ brought about by anthropogenic human activities.