Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law
A woman sees a child fall down a well, so she climbs a fence onto private property to save the child’s life. In the unlikely event that the woman were charged with criminal trespassing, her attorney would use a choice-of-evils defense, also known as a necessity defense, to get her acquitted. He would argue that the child faced an immediate physical threat, and that it was necessary for his client to break the law in order to prevent the child from dying. But what if the threat were something less discrete than a well—the air, the water, the very ground beneath our feet? What if it imperiled every child in a neighborhood, or on the planet? Would the necessity defense still hold?
Chris Hunkeler