The Digital Dialogue was co-organized by the Heidelberg “Epochal Lifeworlds” Team and the Confucius Institute at Heidelberg University with its partner university, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Jacqueline Lorenzen, who held the Argelander Professorship for the Law of Sustainability and Ecological Transformation at the University of Bonn, and Shih-Yun LIU, Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, engaged in a dialogue to discuss legal as well as justice issues related to sustainability and ecology from an administrative and historical perspective.
Legal questions of international, inter- and intragenerational justice in climate protection policy
Abstract: In view of the politically and socially highly controversial so-called German Heating Act, the question of social compensation mechanisms as well as that of distributive justice in the context of climate protection measures is increasingly coming to the fore. I would therefore like to discuss the extent to which state actors are obliged to establish inter- and intragenerational justice on the one hand, but also international justice on the other and by means of which instruments this justice can be implemented.
About the speaker: Jacqueline Lorenzen is Argelander Junior Professor for the Law of Sustainability and Ecological Transformation at the University of Bonn. She studied law at the University of Heidelberg, where she also received her PhD. Before taking up her position at Bonn University, she worked as a research assistant at the University of Heidelberg and was part of the research network „Rethinking Environment“ in which the Heidelberg worldmaking team is also participating. Currently, she is particularly devoted to juridical questions of sustainable city planning and development and addresses problems within the dynamic Climate Change Law from an international, European and national perspective. Current publications are, for example, Natürlicher Klimaschutz in der Stadt – Handlungsfelder, Instrumente und Herausforderungen (Deutsches Verwaltungsblatt 2023, 398–406); Staatsziel Umweltschutz, grundrechtliche Schutzpflichten und intertemporaler Freiheitsschutz in Zeiten der Klimakrise (Verwaltungsblätter Baden-Württemberg, 2021, 485–494).
Eco-civilization and -justice in Chinese culture
Abstract: Environment has been translated to “环境huanjing” in Chinese, a term of Chinese characters learned from Japanese “kankei” in Meiji period. However, it may not mean ancient Chinese had no ideas of natural surroundings and its protection. I would like to discuss the possibility how to covert the traditional Chinese norms in protecting environment to modern social values and maybe, the legal infrastructure too.
About the speaker: Michael Shiyng LIU is Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Global Professor at the Asian Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD in 2000 from the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on environmental history and the history of medicine. He was professor at the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica. He is the author of Prescribing Colonization: The Role of Medical Practice in Japan-Ruled Taiwan, 1895-1945 (Ann Arbor, MI: AAS, 2009), “Eating Well for Survival: Chinese Nutrition Experiments during the Second World War,” in Angela Ki Che Leung et al. eds., Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia, (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2019), “Transforming Medical Paradigms in 1950s Taiwan,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 11 (4): 477-497 (2017), and other related publications.
