It was way back in the “before times”—November of 2019—that Nancy Fisher and Nikki Hatza, the Temple Law Review symposium editors for the 2019–2020 academic year, first contacted me to say that they wanted the next law review symposium to focus on the climate crisis.
Wow. What a difference a year makes! It, of course, never occurred to us that we would be holding the 2021 symposium—A Gathering Wave: Emerging Legal and Policy Implications of Climate Migration—over Zoom. Nor did we know we would holding this symposium against the backdrop of a brand‑new Biden‑Harris administration, which would not only allow federal employees to talk about climate change for the first time in four years but would also put climate and environmental justice front and center in virtually everything it is doing, across every agency and department of the executive branch. This all‑of‑government approach to the climate crisis is extraordinary—a sea change that goes far beyond anything we have seen before, even from the Obama administration.