“Criminal law on climate protection without alternatives?” – Normative Orders Working Paper 01/2024 published

In the recently published Normative Orders Working Paper “Alternativloses Klimaschutzstrafrecht? Climate catastrophism and the exceptionalization of criminal law as drivers into an imaginative dead end”, Finn-Lauritz Schmidt (Goethe University, research initiative “ConTrust”) examines the recent debate on a criminal law for climate protection from the perspective of the sociology of the future and criminal law.

At the heart of the article is the thesis that it is precisely the combination of catastrophic visions of the future – here explored via the key future sociological concept of imagination and descriptively and analytically referred to as “climate catastrophism” – and exceptionalizing readings of criminal law that proves to be a driver of punitivity. According to Schmidt, it corresponds to the noble tasks of criminal law scholarship to anticipate these developments prospectively, to clarify them and to turn them critically – especially with regard to the countercurrent and fragility of social developments or the contingency of a criminal law read as political. A finalized version of the article will be published in 2024 in an anthology edited by Burchard/Schmitt-Leonardy/Singelnstein/Zabel (“Alternatives to Criminal Law”).

Further information and the working paper in Open Access: Here…