Ted Hamilton will speak about the climate necessity defense, a legal theory put forward by climate activists to justify their acts of civil disobedience. Discussing cases he’s worked on with Climate Defense Project — a legal non-profit he founded with two other law school graduates in 2016 — Ted will discuss the political strategy of activist defendants who bring their causes into court. He will also address doctrinal challenges and the place of the climate necessity defense in the broader context of climate law and climate justice mobilization.
Ted Hamilton is a co-founder of Climate Defense Project, a non-profit that represents climate change activists engaged in civil disobedience and provides legal support to the climate justice movement. He is also a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Yale, where his research focuses on environmental ideologies and social change in the United States and Latin America, with a focus on the way that the human-nonhuman divide is represented in law and literature.