The Tale of the ANT, the Carbon Lawyer and the Polar Bear: Analysing the Role of Lawyers in Constructing Knowledge and Certainty in Climate Discourse

This article does not follow the traditional path of the “In the Market” section whereby an area of “climate law” is delimited and discussed, in the language of the neo-liberal contract lawyers, in order to suggest uncertainty and/or solutions to uncertainty. Instead, this article seeks to engineer reflection by practitioners (including those without formal legal training) on the formation, revision and materialization of knowledge and (un)certainty in legal discourse relating to climate change. Some will dismiss such reflection as mere navel gazing, but hopefully others will consider that, given carbon lawyers are “an obligatory passage point” in the geography of climate discourse,1 analysis of their role has value. By way of disclaimer, although the analysis borrows the tools and methodology (including first person interviews2) of sociology, the author is not a sociologist and refers the reader to the work of Michel Callon,3 Bruno Latour4 and John Law5 for further background.