Abstract: International law is often invoked as a central tool in the struggle for climate justice—a coupling that sits uneasily with international law’s role in the expansion and reproduction of the fossil-fuelled capitalist economy that produced the crisis in the first place. This article explores this tension by bringing Alyssa Battistoni’s account of nature as a ‘free gift’ within the capitalist social form into conversation with Evgeny Pashukanis’s commodity-form theory of law. It argues that because the climate system remains external to the value form, and the legal form carries a categorical symmetry with the latter, the climate system can only appear in law through its translation into forms compatible with property and exchange—the basic premises of capitalism. The article concludes that such translation ultimately risks reproducing the market logics that produced the crisis in the first place, and that international climate law is therefore unlikely to deliver the transformative change necessary to achieve climate justice. The transformation necessary for a sustainable planetary future consequently requires forms of political struggle that exceed the boundaries of the legal form.
