
Isabelle joined the Organization for Programs on Environmental Sciences as an associate professor in 2017. After a doctorate in International Law (Paris II Panthéon-Assas University) and a post-doctorate in Comparative Environmental Law (University of Tokyo, Graduate School for Law and Politics), she taught at Niigata University (2001-2004), Tohoku University (2004-2008), and Nagoya University (2012-2016). Between 2008 and 2012, she was researcher at the French Research Institute on Japan (Maison franco-japonaise, Tokyo) established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and associated with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Her main teaching areas are: 1) Earth System Law and Governance; 2) Science, Technology and Law in the Anthropocene; 3) Critical environmental legal thought.
Isabelle's main research interest lies in Law and the Anthropocene as an emergent field of study. 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.