The Law and Geopolitics of Green Development

Addressing climate change will require countries to transition to low-carbon energy and transportation at adequate speed and scale. Lawyers will play an essential role in this transition: not only environmental and energy lawyers, but also those working in trade, national security, international business, and human rights. All will need to understand how geopolitics, economic development, and security interact with climate and environmental goals in complex and evolving ways.

One increasingly important, and still understudied, area is the law and geopolitics of clean technology supply chains. Solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and batteries depend on global supply chains, from mining and processing critical minerals to manufacturing components and deploying finished products. Over the past two decades, these supply chains have come to be dominated by Chinese firms backed by state industrial policy and finance. China now accounts for more than 90 percent of global manufacturing capacity for key solar components, roughly 80 percent of battery cells, and over 90 percent of rare earth refining. This dominance has raised economic and security concerns in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, which governments are addressing through a growing array of legal countermeasures: industrial policy, tariffs, export controls, national security measures, and human rights sanctions. China has responded with countermeasures of its own. Meanwhile, the rapid expansion of clean technology raises environmental and social concerns, including pollution and labor abuses in mining, harm to ecosystems and endangered species, and the sidelining of alternative visions of environmentalism, such as those that question growth or center the rights of marginalized communities.

This seminar examines the legal and political dimensions of this competition. We will cover China's path to clean technology dominance; U.S. and European efforts to compete with and constrain China; and how countries in the Global South are pursuing their own development models amid great-power competition. Supply chains are usually analyzed as economic phenomena. This seminar centers law instead, examining how legal regimes make clean technologies available, govern their environmental and social impacts, and distribute their benefits and costs across places and populations. Students will come away understanding how states use industrial policy, legal tools and countermeasures (sometimes called “lawfare”), and environmental regulation to build supply chains for themselves and their allies, and to constrain those of their competitors.

Course Structure and Evaluation:The seminar meets for nine sessions, 9:00–11:55 a.m., Monday, January 4, through Thursday, January 14, 2027 (no weekend sessions). Given the intensive format, we will supplement lecture and discussion with guest speakers and in-class exercises. No prerequisites. Evaluation will be based on attendance, participation, and a research paper due during the Spring 2027 final exam period. The course is SAW-eligible. Excluding footnotes, SAW papers must be at least 9,000 words, and non-SAW papers at least 5,000 words.