 Thank you very much Dean for the invitation. Thank you Hans for the organization. Thank you commentators for hopefully commenting generously. It's rare that you have assigned commentators on a thank you everybody who came. I hope you won't regret it and said much of this is about comparative law I say is about making a strange familiar. I'll try that today because the topic I talk about was very strange to me when I chose it. And it's strange to my discipline and that's going to be one of the points that I'll make. And I hope it will not be as strange to you as it was for me in the beginning but we'll see about that. So let me start. It is the first among all empires. Human laws are man made of course but not really climate shapes what lawmakers want and climate shapes whether people will follow their laws. Rulers think they rule but it's really climate that rules them. Sometimes we call that climate determinism if we think of strict determination. Sometimes we think of something loser in climate theory. I will not bother much with that difference although it will come back in the. So this idea that climate really shapes laws looks eccentric today to comparative lawyers and comparative law we rarely ascribe effects to climate. We hardly even remember the theory climate theory climate determinism the most recent extensive discussion of climate in comparative law as a factor determining laws is 50 years old. When textbooks to discuss the factors that define differences in laws climate is often not mentioned at all. And if it's mentioned comparative lawyers don't know what to make of it. It's not open to discussion to doubt that geography can influence law says will be official only to show them that he does not really know to what extent and what way that is the case. So we don't have climate as a factor in comparative law anymore. That was different once it was different in Montesquieu style. Climate was an important factor that accounts for differences between legal orders perhaps the most important of all factors. And he was not alone in this. From antiquity until the 19th century climate played a central role in all sciences, comparative law included his disappearance is recent, which makes our amnesia yet more positive. I'll tell the story of that rise and fall, because I think both the existence and the fall that is both the presence of remnants of climate in comparative law, and this absence as an explicit factor. Tell us a lot about where comparative law stands, but also what some of its shortcomings are today. And so this is in large parts, a history, but it's not only that, because I also think it has implications for comparative law today. So I hope you'll still be awake towards the end of my remarks when I come to that those implications. And because the implications are formulated as questions. I also hope that you will help find the answers to them. So much of climate theory was laid out before Montesquieu in antiquity really. What sets Montesquieu apart from those earlier sources were really two things. First, his empirical approach, rather than a speculative philosophical approach. He draws on actual facts about the world or at least what it takes to be such facts because he's not a very good empiricist, and much of what he knows comes from very dodgy sources, but at least that's his approach. And second, his explicit focus on law, that is for him, climate theory is a part of an esprit de loi of focus on laws, rather than a theory of itself. If he's considered the founder, not only of legal sociology and legal anthropology, but also of comparative law, it is because of his method. And that method is intimately linked for him to climate. In essence, Montesquieu made three contributions to the method of comparative law. First, an emphasis on difference. Montesquieu still ascribes to the theory of natural law. He has to, or the church would ban him even more forcefully than they did. But he thinks that local laws are variants of natural law. And in essence, he's interested in the variants. He's not really interested in natural law, per se. And so that sets him apart from the church at the time, which gives him trouble. It sets him apart from legal unifiers today. And people would think that law is really one everywhere. It makes him an ally, an idol, you could even say of those comparative lawyers who idolize difference in law. You also see him as an ally in a second point, and that's what's regarded as the theory of legal transplants. The transplants means essentially that rules, institutions, approaches are taken from one legal system and adopted in another legal system. The United States adopts, Mexico adopts the bankruptcy code modeled after the US bankruptcy code. Certain ideas and tort liability travel from California to the Netherlands and the like. Some people think that that happens all the time and it's very easy. The World Bank suggests that countries should freely borrow laws from each other. Montesquieu did not really think that that was very likely to be successful. Political and civil laws of each nation, he suggested, and I quote, should be so well adapted to the people for whom they are made. But it's only by extreme chance that the laws of one nation can suit any other. Critics of legal transplants set him on their side as well. And I mentioned now that a very famous comparative lawyer he used to be at this university, Pierre Legrand, who's now at Paris, was an ardent supporter of both the idea of difference and the idea of the impossibility of legal transplants and occasionally invoked Montesquieu in his favor. So both of those, the differences and the difficulty of legal transplants implies the third contribution of Montesquieu, the one most relevant for my topic today, the contextual approach to comparative law. So Montesquieu law was not autonomous, but influenced by external factors. Today in comparative law, it's almost common sense we do not compare only legal rules, we compare law in context. And that context is usually a cultural societal context with cultural approaches to law. Many of the factors that Montesquieu mentions as relevant are those that we still have in lists today. The lifestyle in inclinations, the legal culture, if you want, the political system is one such factors, the legislative intent is one factor that explains difference. But then also Montesquieu focuses on, in a quote again, the physical facts of the country, the freezing, torrid or temperate climate. And that seems odd to us in comparative law now. Why should a cold or the heat of the climate have a direct impact on the laws? For Montesquieu, it clearly was important. No less than four books of his SPD law are dedicated to climate and climate appears in many others of them as well. He does not think or at least he claims he does not think that climate is the most important of those factors. As he says, to the degree that one of these causes acts with more force in each nation, the others yield to it. Nature and climate almost alone dominate savages, manners govern the Chinese, laws tyrannize Japan, the ethos used to set the tone in Lassidimon, government maxims and the ancient ethos set it in Rome. But this is not the whole story. Elsewhere Montesquieu demonstrates how the manners of the Chinese, the laws of the Japanese, the methods of the Greeks and the government of the Romans are all in turn shaped by climate. And so in that sense really climate is the first among empires. Now, to some extent we could say this is not so unusual to some extent of course law has to respond to climate. Two examples from Montesquieu. The first, the heat he says of the climate can be so excessive that the body will utterly lack stress. And we all know that. And we would say what does that mean for employment, employment law we have to for labor law. We have to make sure that workers get more vacation fewer times for him it's the opposite right you have to have servitude extra harsh laws to make sure that the lazy people work nonetheless. Strange and harsh for us but it's common law make responsive law making responding to a particular situation. So the reasoning seems rational even though the result seems unpleasant. Second example also more common alcohol. I suggest as different effects in different climates in the heat it will coagulate the globules of blood. And so people should and want to drink much water instead. And therefore, alcohol will and must be banned as it indeed is in Islamic countries. No such coagulation happens in the cold where instead the climate seems to impel people to a certain national inebriation very different from that of the individual person. That's true for the Netherlands as well. And so alcohol must be permitted and even encouraged for national identity. So again, this seems strange to us the coagulation of the blood is not really what we think of today but the kind of responsive law making physics is the framework of law is familiar to us. But most of this theory is really different and more interesting and more complex, because Montesquieu in fact in visit is a complex multi stage process. First climate Montesquieu suggests makes an impact on the body, not on the fibers, the fibers in the cold are short. And for that reason people become strong and the fibers are long in the heat. And for that reason, people are lazy. People in the cold north are more courageous than those in the hot sun. They're more willing to work and less given to sensual pleasures. So that's true. They're willing to cultivate land and need not to be forced to do this, while those in the South need incentives. And those in the North are more moral than those in hot climates, moving in a southerly direction it is like leaving morality itself behind more intense passions will multiply crimes. And you recognize these stereotypes today still, right? The lazy people in the Mediterranean, the hardworking people in the Netherlands, even lazier people in Africa, and we had the credit crunch in Greece. The German idea was that the hardworking Germans should not have to work for the lazy Greeks in the South. So these stereotypes still continue today. And they're cultural for Montesquieu, right? Climate works on the body, the body works on the mind, and the mind collectively then works on society. So societies are shaped by climate. So up until here then climate determinism is an explanation of cultural differences. The focus on differences among laws comes as a logically second step. Laws must match both individual psychology and collective culture. If it is true that the character of the mind and the passions of the heart are extremely different in the various climates, laws must be relative both to the difference of those passions and the differences of those characters. So taking together it's not surprising what these differences are. If people in the heat are immoral and driven to crimes, punishments must therefore be harsh, and that's his observation. If people in the cold by contrast are virtuous and vigorous, then punishment is essential to regulate societies and individuals can be given incentives to further their own well-being, for example through private property or through democratic systems. So similar climate has an impact on the proper form of government. If people in the heat are given to pleasure, unwilling to take responsibility, but cunning and intelligent, then despotism is the proper form of government for them in the heat. By contrast people in cold climate can have agency and so despotism is wrong for them while monarchy, enlightened monarchy or republicanism would be appropriate. So the argument should be clear without further examples. Climate determinism can be viewed as a combination of two relations. One is the relation between climate and society, and the second is the relation between society and law. Both relations are laws from Montesquieu, but they're very different as, quote, the intelligent world is far from being governed as well as the physical world. But there are two has laws, which by their nature and variable, natural laws, it does not follow them constantly as the physical world follows their own. So we might think we don't have to worry about climate determinism because it only concerns the power between climate and mind and society. That's where we have determinism or not, but as lawyers, we're free to with agency, we're free to shape the law in any way that we want. But that's not true for Montesquieu for three reasons. First, the difference exists for him, but it's not as strict as it is for us today. Laws of nature and political and civil laws belong to the same world. They were not entirely of different kinds. It means on the one hand that describing to Montesquieu an idea of determinism in the physical world is inaccurate. You have much more in terms of correlations or conjunctions and strict possessions. You would not say climate makes society, but that there is a correlation between the things that I mentioned earlier. It means on the other hand that laws, human laws are not entirely discretionary, not entirely independent from the constraints of the physical world. In that sense, both of those relations are not entirely different. Second, the steps in the causal chain were not absolutely separated from each other because these are not entirely independent entities. Montesquieu did not support a strict separation between the animate and inanimate world nor between culture and nature. The relations between body and mind did not rest on a strict dualism for him. And Montesquieu did not yet subscribe to a strict individualism that would make the person independent from society. So all these correlations are also correlations between entities that are not fully separated from each other. And the third important element I think in this to see the degree to which humans are independent from the climate was different for different types of society. If making proper laws is a function of human agency, then it's only possible in a climate that enables such agency called climate. This is the reason why, again, nature and climate almost alone dominate savages but not really others. And this creates a vicious cycle for those living in hot climates. The climate has derived them of agency so that they cannot create other institutions within which they could regain such agency. And they're largely stuck with despotism, slavery or servitude and no chance for development. As he says, the mind which has once received impressions can no longer change them and therefore laws are today in the Orient, what they were a thousand years ago. Those in the North may also have this party governments occasionally, but they can realize that despotism is not good at least for them and choose better government structures. Those in the heat are subjects, those in the cold are agents of history, fate and of their own laws. And again to step back, that's the stereotype that we still have today. The idea of Oriental despotism, the idea that the Islamic world is stuck back in time because of culture, is one that we still maintain today and has a long trajectory also through climate ideas. So those then really are, that's where climate plays a role and climate here plays a role in modern times, not as an outside condition, but only as a framework background thing to which the law responds. But as the framework within which individuals, society, and laws are shaped or conditioned. And Hans rightly said that I've talked to comparative lawyers and they said first, I don't believe Montesquieu said that and then second I don't believe he meant it. And third, I don't believe anyone else believed him and the opposite is true. Climate theory was clearly the rage during and after Montesquieu. It was not uncontested. While Thier was not convinced, he thought that the form of government matters much more human human thought that moral causes not physical causes matter. But many others agreed and that stories often told many others in law, agreed as well. So one example, this is William Falcon as someone you may not have heard of but someone who writes this long and very influential, the very kind of mediocre book remarks on the influence of climate etc etc but really of climate on mankind. Very schematic he analyzed the influence of different climates on the object and the form of the law, the murder trial and punishments. Not surprisingly, temperate climate works best. Neither law serves neither as a punishment nor as mere compensation, but to deter crimes, labor laws protected the accused and Charles were accidentally adapted to discovering the truth. In other words, he was describing English law, but then saying English law is also the best law because the English have the best time. But since the Greeks that we think that temperate climate is really the best time, the Greeks had the theory that people in the north are strong but stupid. And people in the south are smart but lazy. And the Greeks miraculously pick up the good things from both sides, they could also pick up the bad sides from both sides, but they are as strong as those in the north and as smart as those in the south. Montesquieu has the same idea that temperate time is really best except that he thinks the temperate in the best is not in Greece, but in France. And England is already not as great because it's in the north and Falconer says Montesquieu is right on almost everything except England is also really temperate Germany is not temperate the Netherlands is not temperate but England is really temperate. So this is what shapes law there, but you can see this is a quasi physical justificatory approach to determining why English law is the way that it is, and why English law is better than other laws. Now, in one way, does this kind of climate theory becomes so attractive in comparative law. Three influences that I can see first culture. This becomes an explanation for culture as you saw in Montesquieu climate change shaped society society shaped law and we find that in a lot of literature of the time. A miracle Amari in his treatise, this is the 18th century to discuss climate as the first among the relevant factors, although he emphasizes that its role should not be overplayed. For money Montesquieu serve very much as a model for the new science of comparative law in presenting a physical theory and from there to trace a legislative theory. And that influence can be traced elsewhere. So what you can see here the kind of reasoning is to say we have to find this is the enlightenment thinking we have to find causes for the effects that we see. We see differences in the law, those must derive from certain external factors, and those external factors must be physical factors. And so they are climate factors so the method and the focus on climate as that external stable factor come together. So we can find this elsewhere as well. Carlo Antonio Pilati held that new laws should be adapted to the conditions of each country with type of government climate and the traditions and habits of its people. Pilanieri developed a theory of laws of what he calls relative goodness relative that is to local conditions including climate, which he discussed at length. Like Montesquieu he did not argue for determinism legislators should follow advantageous effects of climate but counter those that are harmful and other theorists of legislation agree. So for a long time the theory of legislation is a theory of climate. So we can make laws adapt the climate, even if Italy at this time of course has the best climate because these are the people living in Italy. We still think that the legislature in Italy has to consider climate and cannot simply make the same laws as the legislature in France, or elsewhere. The theory is not uncontested. In 1767 already quotes assigned no influence to climate at all for proper legislation. German guy didn't like the German like the French. Maine in his famous ancient law tried at Montesquieu for paying little or no regard to the inherited qualities of the race, those qualities which each generation receives from its predecessors and transmits but slightly altered the generation which follows it. In vain Frederick Pollock this is 1990 suggested that Montesquieu overrated the influence of climate and under external conditions underrated, if he did not wholly neglect the effects of race and tradition. And out of that institutions which belong to different stages are not commensurable terms in any scientific comparison. One of those address the problem inherent in climate determinism, if climate states the same, how can we account for legal change, problem that Voltaire already addressed Montesquieu said, really the air in Rome was different during antiquity than it is today. And that might be true but that wasn't very convincing to others but you can see even those who opposed the theory still have to grapple with it and its effects. The second kind of approach where culture comes in is to national culture, especially the writer there. So Pasquale Stanislaw Mancini, the great Italian international lawyer, subscribed to the theory that climate has on peoples including the typology of strong northerners in weak southerners that's a constant. And his project of course was to base international law and constitutional on the nation. So we had to have an idea of the nation what brings the nation together. And for him, that was climate. That was influential not only in Italy was also influential in Germany in 1761 so this is again very short after Montesquieu writes in 1748. You are home on fun. And he was discovering what he calls the geist, the gazette at the origin, combining Montesquieu's cosmopolitanism with an early German nationalist agenda. Climate was the first among the factors he discussed. And that becomes at some point, the German idea of folks guys. So the idea of folks guys that shapes a lot of romantic 19th century thinking is one that emerges from the esprit de loi and deep folks guys becomes a translation of Montesquieu's esprit de loi. And in the beginning is one that is shaped by culture by by climate. Here that we introduced the notion still thought that climate played an important role, although he already said that it is not deterministic is quite as the climate thing is nice. So it gives a tendency but it does not in itself. And hearing said on the one hand that half of what we know about societies come from climate. But on the other hand, says, actually, there is human agency. Not Europe had the European, but Europe had Europe. So what you see here is the tension that the enlightenment already has translated to the 19th century on the one hand climate shapes. But on the other hand, in so far as under the proper climate we have agency that agency makes us independent from client. And so climate makes independent Europeans who in turn then can shape Europe by themselves precisely because they have agents. And that sense climate theory is an explanation, but also as an explanation for how we can come out of climate and it's determined something I'll come to in a moment. So it's such influenced the idea of Lebensraum. Friedrich Hatze, a very unpleasant legal geographer, very famous but also very nationalistic and racist comes with the idea of what he calls anthropogeography. For a long time in is in geography in particular the climate ideas and climate determinism becomes very influential. So climate is what shapes geography and by extension untouched for geography, the people living there. So this becomes an at the same time a theory about culture, but also a theory about race, but it's also a theory about space. So it gets translated into many areas. Here's one that is the invention of a field called geo jurisprudence, the idea that law somewhere emerges from and in turn shapes the space. And that includes the Lebensraum and turns then at some point into Nazi ideas about Lebensraum. So the idea is that yes the Germans were shaped by climate and geography, but that made them strong and stronger than those elsewhere. And for that reason entitled to take over law lands from from Elsa. You can see how this shifts from Montesquieu right Montesquieu was very much not about travel was much about saying there's no possibility to transplant laws but by assimilation also people here this gets turned on its head. German climate makes strong Germans who in turn have the right to overrun those living in in other climates that make them weaker. And so there is one reason at least for the decline of climate terminism at the time that it becomes a racist and becomes adopted by the Nazis it loses some of its attraction, but it has these attractions. So what are these attractions of climate theory. So first, of course, it is a way to explain differences between laws and that also means hierarchies between both. So that was important intellectually and it was important politically climate theory enabled and continues to enable both Eurocentric perspectives and the justification of European hierarchy provided a natural reason why the laws of Europeans were superior to those in the rest of the world. And more importantly, perhaps it justified why the legal achievements of European nations could not be replicated elsewhere. Why, for example, the British would extend the protection of their laws would not extend the protection of their laws to their colonial subjects. And why they said the Indians have to have a code because the Indians are stupid so they need laws written down whereas we in the enlightened United Kingdom we can live by the common law. Second implication was not only about differences between laws, however, but also about differences between people. And there it becomes a little trickier. Forcing people to work from hot climates were naturally lazy was defensible. First, they had to be forced because they were lazy. But second, they were used to the heat, and therefore less subject to its harshness. This makes slavery more appropriate. Montesquieu is famous as an opponent to slavery, which he calls not in accordance with natural law, but Montesquieu also has a famous and very contested chapter where he makes a defense of slavery with the sentence, if I had to defend the right, we have had to make slaves of Negroes. Here's what I would say. This reminds of O.J. Simpson's book if I did it, right? He does not really say this is what I'm arguing. But he says if I were to argue this then this is what it would be. And it's a logical argument if you want from climates here. And it's one that becomes popular elsewhere. It's 1861 succession declaration justifying simultaneously the institution of slavery in hot regions and the need for Africans to be slave. The State of Mississippi suggests we have to have slavery because it's important for the economy, and the slaves have to be Africans because they are used to this from the heat anyway. With regard to British India, one legislative council member argued that it would be even absurd to sentence an Englishman and Indian to the same term of confinement in a jail, given that the heat was much tougher on the European than it was on an Indian. In the Panama Canal zone, West Indian workers received lower wages and fewer benefits than their white coworkers because quote being accustomed to the tropics and the different mode of living they do not require special quarters or frequent change of climate which is so necessary to the health of the more skilled employee from a temperate zone. You also something shifted by what is to say the people in the South need extra incentives to work because they're lazy. No, the idea they need fewer incentives to work because they already used to the heat. And so there then is the racist implication of climate theory again, also in law, and that is one reason for the decline. What kinds of reasons do we have for the decline. I'll come to those in a moment. Let me first tell you how climate disappears from comparative law. And it's a bit of a mystery because suddenly in a sense it's no longer there no longer discussed. There's no explicit rejection that I can see a climate theory except the arguments that you already saw in May and pull up to say, this is no longer so important. And today, it plays hardly any role anymore has no use in classifying legal orders when we talk about legal families we don't typically talk about climate. It cannot explain legal change for us. It plays no role for any of the methods in comparative law. And when we talk about the context of laws we talk the cultural context and not a climate context. And so indeed the latest the most recent extensive publication I know about climate theory in comparative law is from 1973. And it's actually very bad. Let me give you three examples of this decline, perhaps to see how this plays out in comparative law. First, I said earlier, people like the official think they come that climate still plays a role in comparative law and they're not not so sure how much the example he brings is one that many others bring is from water law. That is to suggest areas that have a lot of water, do not have to have the same laws for access to water, then areas this is Colorado that have very little water. That's true, and it's going to be of crucial importance in the climate crisis. Because this is responsive lawmaking in the way in which I explained it earlier. It's just that water has a different value in different areas. It's a different physical object of the law that creates impacts on concrete lawmaking. It's not want to give a theory of law shaping society that then shapes the law. So this is not really an explanation, really an example of climate theory at all. It's a model of climate theory that gets rejected. So this is a book on the Great Plains in the United States. Walter Prescott Webb is explicitly comparative. He says people in the West are different from those in the East, because then the geography climate shapes and makes them different and so his idea is very much to establish an independent identity of people in what we call the Wild West, those in on these cuts, the snobs in New York and in Harvard. It's a theory that has been mostly discarded. Kermit Hill in 1922, 92 finds empirically that those differences exist, but they exist also within society so they are not really in the client. So the scholar even finds that what made it possible to settle in the plains was precisely the fact that people took with them the laws that they had learned in these cuts. So people from Massachusetts and people from Louisiana both have the same legal culture, and that's how in fact they connected. That's how they were able to establish new laws so much in the West. So in that sense, the West was not only less wild than we think it was also less Western than we think it was very much the transplant if you want to Eastern ideas to the center of the United States. A third example maybe and this is Scandinavia, this is the idea that still meanders around sometimes that there is a Nordic legal culture, and that that Nordic legal culture somehow comes from the fact that the climate there is cooler. Yakuza himself a famous comparative lawyer suggests that social capital the social bonds at the individual level relations of trust may well have long historical roots as poverty, the cold climate and other risks to life may have generated solidarity beyond the normal centuries ago. Basically, dramatic shift, right. It used to be the case that the northerners were strong and independent and she's fearful they were great warriors. And now they're all social democrats. So, and in that sense, I think this is what I call a folkloristic argument, there are people who want to establish that there is a Nordic culture. But they themselves said we don't have the impact. And they don't have them because the empirics don't really exist in that sense. And they don't care so much about the empirics they care about an almost kind of flowery argument to establish a Nordic culture rather than an extensive climate. In that sense, we can see that climate theory really disappears from comparative law and where we have remnants of it there more evidence of its absence than they are of its presence. Why did climate theory disappear three reason first reason globalization colonization. We still thought that if climate shaped men, this should mean that climate also shapes men if they change if they move, they move from one place to another, then they will be different people. In Greece, Cyrus, the Persian king says, warrants against settler colonialism, he says that you Persians are strong, you could easily conquer the countries of the week. But if you go and settle there you also become you lose what makes you person. Montesquieu believes the same. He says the children of Europeans born in the Indies loses the courage of their own climate. So that would mean if we believe that we cannot have settler colonialism we cannot have expansionism. And so in that sense it becomes a very unattractive theory. And so we have to have different theory and one way how we shift from climate to race to say that the strong northern race still maintained its strength if it moves to the weak south, and the origins of differences are more within the body, and they are within the climate. And we can see some of similar tendencies today in theories of globalization, we think of trade if you think of mobility of people and mobility of laws that is incompatible in compatible with a theory that places so much determinant value on climate. Second disciplinary climate independence. So Montesquieu suggested that climate determines whether people are suicidal. If you watch Calvary's Mackey films you may still believe that. But sociologically it does not hold up. And Durkheim in his famous study on suicide makes an extensive rejection of Montesquieu and says the data and allow for this conclusion, whether people are suicidal or not does not determine does not depend on climate. But second is also methodologically wrong, because famously Durkheim says social facts are determined by other social society becomes what is later in an autonomous system, auto poetic system. And so, in that sense, also methodologically, we can no longer see causes for development in society outside of society, certainly society responds to impact from outside but it responds by societal ways, and effectively then for a long time sociology focuses only on the societal things. Something similar happens in anthropology, this is Franz Boas, who rejects the climate determinism that exists in geography of this time and suggests we have to look at culture as something man made, rather than at climate as that which really shapes changes and differences. And of course anthropology has a space for climate, but for a long time again takes climate as something that is maybe constructed by society, maybe impact society, but cares very much about the anthropos in that, unless on the geography part and we see the same comparative law theory, so social theories of comparative law look at social factors they adopt Durkheim's idea that is social facts that matter, and reject the idea that climate shapes them. So there we have disciplinary climate independence, but we have another type of climate independence that matters to us factual climate independence. We see here an air conditioner. Why is the air conditioner so important because effectively, it becomes possible in the 19th and 20th century to become independent from climate. It doesn't matter if it's hot outside if you have a climate, if you have an AC inside. It doesn't matter if the sun doesn't come out during the night, because you have electrical. It doesn't matter if the climate makes your soil dry, because we have matters of irrigation. It doesn't matter if the climate creates lots of pests, because we can have chemicals to fight that. So we have factual climate independence for 19th and 20th century. And that's one reason why also the theory also by comparative law suggests this is largely independent we no longer have to worry about climate. We of course means to some extent we in the north, because the same is not to the same level in the global south, which remains more subject to the heat because of poverty, less has less access to the achievements of science, and therefore is more subject to this. So interestingly, Montesquieu continuity. Montesquieu says the savages are governed by climate because they are lazy because they don't really lack agency. Now they still lack agency because they don't have the means both financial and technological to have the same freedom and liberty as those do in the north. And so in that sense, this is why climate disappears from the discipline of comparison. And now that means we are stuck with a discipline that has no space for climate in the time in which climate becomes a determining element of the time. Here's one example is not well prepared. You are too famous books that revive really climate determinism around the turn of the century. Jared diamonds guns, German and steel, and David Landis's wealth and poverty of nations that suggests really the European advantage. Again, you realize the best of other people that we are. It's a climate advantage they use to the climate in different ways. And for that reason, they can conquer North America, for example, that is, during diamond theory, Europe is in a horizontal way. And so there's a lot of travel whereas Africa is in a vertical way with different climate zones. And so there's less travel, much of that is not empirically true. It's very ideological, but it's very influential, and it shapes people in the law. Here's one example field that is called physio economics very bizarre this could come right off out of this queue if you want with climate on top that shape shape shape shape at some point comes a political social systems, and then comes behavior. And then direct deterministic theory that is revived. Why is it deterministic theory revive because I would suggest disciplinary independence of sociology and anthropology and comparative law means that we no longer have a space for the physical disciplines and so the physical disciplines rely on very different ontologies. Some of them at least very deterministic ideas. And now that climate becomes important again we in we implement those deterministic ideas back within our thought. That of course is a dangerous thing, it would mean that after we were independent from climate suddenly we are completely determined by. Cambridge geographer suggests that if indeed climate catastrophe is the only thing that matters, then we could say determines everything that we do determines all the laws that we cannot cannot have suddenly we move from a space of total three to a space of total determination. And he at the same time suggests that this is a dangerous development. It's a dangerous development not only because it underestimates the space of agency that we maintain. It's also dangerous from a methodological perspective, it revives a kind of determinism that was rightly discarded in the past. There's no complete no complete separation between nature and culture. But there's also no reason to treat culture again as it was as though it were nothing else, but nature as though we were completely determined by climate. So, in that it's in that space that we have newer theories in how to deal with climate how to deal with the Anthropocene I named, I bring a number of names you may be familiar to you in general disciplines. We also have attempts to translate such things into the law, our name along portage policy and jurisprudence ratio and we are what's ecological jurisprudence, Alexander Damiano suggesting that we have a law of the Anthropocene. We are in it, and we could see in others with their point on earth systems law, something that Laura has also written about. And we can name Michelle self and Bruno Latour with their ideas respectively of the contra nature for Michelle self or contract with nature and Bruno Latour's Parliament of things, both ways of extending political ideas down to nature. Now, Latour, interestingly, speaks of a new as predéloire, as predéloire nature, the spirit of the natural world. And that brings in the idea doesn't want to skew actually help us in the return of climate deal with the return of climate in a way that is other than subjecting ourselves completely to its determining forces. Not fully, of course, Montesquieu's world is not ours for various reasons. His empirical knowledge was vastly inferior to ours. Climate, for example, climate at the time is still just a zone, even here that still says it's a chaos of things and now we have a very good idea of climate threatening frightening but very precise. Plus the racist implications of Montesquieu's theory make much of it suspicious. And yet, going back to Montesquieu's world ironically may help us move forward beyond the conceptual ontological stalemate that we have in the deterministic worldview that we have adopted in the 19th century. There are scholars that suggest that the integrated ecology of the Renaissance climate theories is a possible model for us today. Other suggests that Montesquieu's world which is 18th century could be one of that precisely because it is a way of thinking together, nature and culture society and individual agency and determination, etc. So in that sense then Montesquieu perhaps becomes attractive all of a sudden again. How would that work in comparative law? What would a new SPD law naturally really imply? We'll just give you three such ideas or such elements that we would need. First, and that's almost obvious, we have to go against determinism, but we also have to go against climate independence and we have to go against things in between. Climate doesn't determine us, we're not independent from climate, we're not constrained by climate, we are I would say conditioned by climate. In comparative law we've done this before. We know this about culture and history. We know that culture and history are not destiny, nor are they completely malleable to us. Law and society co-produce each other, law produces culture, culture produces law, they both co-produce each other, they both condition each other. Law appears within the conditions that are set by culture, culture determines within the conditions that are set by law. And that mode needs to be extended then to climate. We know we must understand law in context, and for a long time that context was a cultural and societal context. We should also think of law as existing within a physical context, within a climate context. Comparison of laws in their context, something that we do in comparative law, has to be a comparison also of laws in their climatic context. Not only the cultural, it's the nature cultural context to use on a hardware term within which we have to compare laws. Take legal transplants. We know that what is killed was wrong. We know that laws can be transplanted in fact quite easily, but then they adapt to the new circumstance. They become different in meaning although they look the same in their formulation. There's no reason to think that that adaptation is only an adaptation to societal context and not only to climatological context. Why should we not expect that laws can be transplanted between different climatic contexts, but that they also will get adapted to the new context. So the co-production of law and climate involves a comparison in two different ways, depending on whether the rule or the climate is held constant. One way analyzes how different climates condition law, how do similar contract rules fair between different climates, say in France on the one hand and the other countries on the other. Climate is not isolated as a factor here, but neither is it excluded. It becomes one of many aspects that we take into account. The other way analyzes how different laws condition climate. What is the impact on climate of different ways of regulating the traffic industry? For example, that's the more obvious way in which climate comes into comparative law as an object if you want that is co-produced by the law. Second, enhance interdisciplinarity. Again, comparative law has become interdisciplinary. The disciplines with which we match are usually those from the social sciences and humanities. Anthropology, sociology, economics, politics to some extent now are critical theory, feminism and the like. We also have to expand that kind of interdisciplinarity towards the natural sciences, geography, geology, physics, chemistry and the like. That's much harder, of course, to do as you know if you've spoken to a geographer or climate scientist. But it's not impossible in the same way in which we do interdisciplinarity in another context. Some of that exists already, of course. STS approaches to the law, science and technology studies. In many of those areas, we already see how the law is involved in the co-creation of nature and culture. But comparative law may have something to add. I mentioned earlier that Michel Serb speaks of a contra naturelle and Latour speaks of a parliament of things. And we as comparative lawyers know that contract can mean very different things because contracts are different legal systems. And parliaments are very different kinds of setups. And so we have a kind of comparative knowledge that should enrich the understanding of what may be only metaphors for Serb and Latour, but what can become actual institutions from a comparative law perspective. And then thirdly, maybe, here, what I call planetary law. This is in comparative law for a long time when we looked at law and globalization or transnational law or something like that. We would treat the world as an entirety, as an entity, as something within which comparison happens, takes place. But that is confined, of course, to society, it's confined to humans. So Chakrabati's helpful juxtaposition, I would think, between globalization on the one hand, which contains society, and the planetary, which includes the planet at large and which interestingly for Chakrabati is also a comparative approach, may help us as well in developing something that is not global law, world law, transnational law, but actually planetary law that goes beyond just society. What might this enable in comparative law? Let me give you three examples. First, if climate is indeed the first among empires, as Moltrescu suggests, then that's a comparative term because we know empires. As comparative lawyers, we compare empires. And so we could see how can we compare climate empire to other empires. And we could also ask, can we replace climate empire with climate republic, for example? Can we have a say in things that happen, or are we determined by climate as people are in an empire? The same might be true for a notion of laws. What we do in comparative laws is that we compare laws and compare laws of very different kinds and sometimes get stuck with defining what we mean by law. And of course, we never mean laws of nature, but we never mean physical laws because those became separated around the 18th and 19th centuries. Moltrescu, they are still within the same realm, within the same ontology, even though of course they operate very differently. And the question for us, and that's a specific comparative law question, is how do we compare climate laws, the way that climate regulates, the way that climate sets incentives, the way that we can comply or not with climate laws? How do we compare with regulation by human-made laws? And to what extent are they substitutable for each other? Again, an explicit task for comparative law. Third example, theories of legal change. For Moltrescu, of course, climate still remains constant. Climate is a constant background that shapes society and the way that we achieve climate independence, one is to explain legal change, although we have climatic consistency. Now we face the opposite challenge, climate is changing and we want to maintain our laws or as much of our laws as we can have. Can we understand climate change as legal change? Can we say although the laws of nature themselves are of course constant, they're being enforced in much harsher ways. Their interpretation is becoming different. The incentives that they set suddenly become different. Does it help us as comparative lawyers to understand climate change and climate change as a change of the regulation of the empire of the laws that nature really sets for us? And how then can we make that comparison useful to see how we in turn should respond? So you see, these are big questions. I have no answer and Moltrescu does not have the answers. But for me at least and maybe for you, Moltrescu is among those who make it possible not only to posit those questions but also to imagine at least an ontology in which it is possible to address these questions and maybe answer them because I think answering them is a matter of high urgency. Thank you very much.