Isabelle GIRAUDOU

Isabelle joined the University of Tokyo (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) in 2017 as an associate professor. She is affiliated to the Organization for Programs on Environmental Sciences (OPES). After a doctorate in Public International Law (University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas, 1999) and a post-doctorate in Comparative Environmental Law (University of Tokyo, Graduate School for Law and Politics, 2000-2001), she taught at Niigata University (2001-2004), Tohoku University (2004-2008), and Nagoya University (2012-2016). Between 2008 and 2012, she was a research fellow at the French Research Institute on Japan (Maison franco-japonaise, Tokyo) established by the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and associated with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Her main teaching areas are: 1) Earth System Governance; 2) Critical environmental legal thought; 3) PBL approaches to contemporary environmental issues; 3) Science, Technology and Society (STS) in the Anthropocene. 

Isabelle’s research interests relate to Law and/for the Anthropocene. Her current research explores how the converging fields of climate change law and disaster law engage with the ‘Anthropocene’ thought experiment. Her most recent project scrutinises the opportunities for, and the barriers to the development of ‘climate crisis lawyering’ in Japan. It examines in particular the skills, competences, and knowledge that different types of lawyers (attorneys, in-house counsels, government lawyers) can mobilise, both in their contentious and non-contentious legal practice, to address the many legal disruptions caused by a continuously rising risk of more frequent and higher-impact climate change-induced extreme events in Japan. In so doing, this project seeks to illuminate how and the extent to which legal reasoning opens up to new narratives, understandings and modes of thinking, at the interface of Earth system science and planetary social thought.