Eric Boot

No fossil fuel project could be realised without lawyers. This simple observation raises a profound question: what responsibility do lawyers bear for the climate harms that follow from the projects they help make possible?

Eric Boot examines whether lawyers who represent fossil fuel clients are morally complicit in their clients’ climate harms – and if so, whether that complicity is blameworthy. Lawyers operate under a specific set of professional obligations that differ from ordinary moral ones, and the project carefully considers how lawyers’ professional role bears on the question of their complicity. Where blameworthy complicity is found, Boot then asks what lawyers can do about it. The project works through a range of options on an escalation ladder – from counselling fossil fuel clients in a more climate-sensitive manner and lobbying for legal reform, to refusing clients altogether or disclosing confidential information harmful to the corporation – and assesses the justifiability of each.