Liability for Transboundary Pollution at the Intersection of Public and Private International Law

This book focuses on how public and private international law address civil liability for transboundary pollution. In public international law, civil liability treaties promote the implementation of minimum procedural standards in domestic tort law. This approach implicitly relies on private international law to facilitate civil litigation against transboundary polluters. Yet this connection remains poorly understood. Filling the gap, this book engages in a meaningful dialogue between the two areas and explores how domestic private international law can reflect the policies developed in international environmental law. It begins with an investigation of civil liability in international environmental law. It then identifies preferable rules of civil jurisdiction, foreign judgments and choice of law for environmental damage, using Canadian private international law as a case study and making extensive references to European law. Liability for transboundary pollution is a contentious issue of the law, both in scholarship and practice: international lawyers both private and public as well as environmental lawyers will welcome this important work.

Guillaume Laganière is Professor of Law at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada.

Craig Scott is Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, Toronto. He was the founding Director of the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security and founding editor of the journal Transnational Legal Theory. He is the editor of the Hart/Bloomsbury book Torture as Tort: Comparative Perspectives on Transnational Human Rights Litigation (2011) and Series Editor of the Hart Monographs in Transnational and International Law. In 2012-2015, he served as Member of Parliament for Toronto-Danforth in Canada's House of Commons.