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62 Alta. L. Rev. 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/alblr62 and id is 1 raw text is: LAWYERS IN A WARMING WORLD CAROL LIAO* Climate change is the great disrupter of humanity, and the Canadian legal profession is at an inflection point. This article begins by briefly outlining the self-governing legal profession's duties in Canada to uphold and protect the public interest in the administration ofjustice, including ensuring competencies. It then chronicles, and engages in a comparative analysis of, climate change-related resolutions and actions taken across 15 legal bars, societies, and associations around the world and situates those actions to current measures in Canada. In addressing some of the barriers found within self-regulatory bodies and voluntary associations for Canadian lawyers, the article then provides a basic primer for lawyers to understand the growing significance of climate change impacts on legal systems and civilizations and its potential to undermine legal rights. It identifies further areas of research that are needed regarding legal competencies in understanding climate-related risks and opportunities in relation to lawyers' duty of care to their clients in Canada. Rapid developments in the law and evolving risk registers in response to a warming world are creating new understandings of what constitutes climate competent lawyering. This article lays the groundwork for further work in climate-related actions for the Canadian legal profession. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION .............................. II. THE SELF-GOVERNING LEGAL PROFESSION AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST MANDATE ... .. III. CLIMATE ACTION FROM BARS, SOCIETIES, AND ASSOCIATIONS AROUND THE WORLD . A. INTERNATIONAL BAR ASSOCIATION . . B. AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION ..... ... C. G7 RESOLUTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE D. JAPAN FEDERATION OF BAR ASSOCIATIONS E. LAW SOCIETY OF ENGLAND AND WALES F. LAW COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA ..... . G. H. I. J. K. 2 ................................. 4 ................................. 8 .............................. 10 .............................. 12 .............................. 14 ................... 14 ................................ 15 ................................. 16 .. . .. . WALES.......... 17 OF.. . .. ................ 17 ........................ 18 ........................ 19 ....................... 19 GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE BAR (ENGLAND AND WALES) COUNCIL OF BARS AND LAW SOCIETIES OF EUROPE.... NEW ZEALAND LAW SOCIETY ................... ORDEM DOS ADVOGADOS DO BRASIL LAW SOCIETY OF NORTHERN IRELAND Associate Professor, PeterA Allard School of Law, University ofBritish Columbia (UBC); UBC Sauder Distinguished Fellow, Peter P Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics, UBC Sauder School of Business; Chair, Canada Climate Law Initiative; Co-Director, UBC Centre for Climate Justice. My sincere thanks to Hasan Alam and Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson, KC, the co-movers of Resolution 4 at the 2023 Annual General Meeting of the Law Society of British Columbia; the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers (FACL) BC, including David How, Steven Ngo, and the FACL BC Advisory and Advocacy Committees 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. Thank you to the editors and anonymous peer reviewers of the Alberta Law Review for their invaluable comments, and to Martin Shi, Jenaya Copithorne, Wynona Klemt, Justin Chhuor, and Tinashe Muzah for exceptional research assistance. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to the Alberta Law Review. LAWYERS IN A WARMING WORLD 1

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