An understudied area within the Energy Humanities has been the role of legal cases and policies in shaping many of its primary petrofictional texts and as an activist strategy in climate politics or as part of the low-carbon energy transition. While coming from a range of sources with varied purposes, the legal cases seek to use legal discourse as a means of shaping future narratives about energy and climate, but also about the shape of political agencies and geographies. What are the social implications these cases for thinking about city spaces, or the role of institutions and families? How do these cases depend upon precedents from Indigenous legal traditions? How, as discussed in White Masks, Black Fuel, has White resentment politics used anti-climate legislation? Or, to return to aesthetics, what cultural forms correlate to the questions about identity, time, and space raised in these legal and policy fields? From a literary lens, law and the Energy Humanities sheds new light on petrofiction classics as well as offering a rhetoric to use for analyzing new works that focus on energy transitions. For instance, how does Munif’s Cities of Salt use legal status of property and identity as a means of portraying the oil encounter? What is the role of leases and right of way There Will Be Blood? How is Jennifer Haigh’s novel about natural gas Heat and Light a text about legal jurisdiction? Why is the legal status of Osage people in Killers of the Flower Moon central to that text while also marginalized within most critical discussions? How does Paolo Bacigalupi use policies and the law as part of his dystopian novels?


This seminar seeks papers that explore this area of Law and the Energy Humanities through a global lens. They might be legal readings of novels, poetry, drama, or film, or they could be literary analyses of legal cases that examine the narrative constructs that are emerging from this growing number of cases. For scholars in the field of law and literature, this seminar offers an opportunity to consider how these Energy cases fit into or disrupt that area of criticism.


Some of the issues that might be considered:

• Just Transitions


• Rights of Nature


• Energy and Human Rights


• Race and Energy


• RICO statutes


• Jurisdiction


• Cities and Energy Transition


• Indigenous Rights and Energy


• Pipeline Activism 


• Future Generations legislation


• Corporate Greenwashing cases


• Energy Subsidies and Externalities


• Historical debates over Rapid or Prolonged Transitions


• Climate Migration and/or Anti-migration legislation


• Animal Rights legislation


• Petrocultural legal history


• Law and petroculture classics


• Law and Energy Transition or Cli-Fi literature


• Law and Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction