Benjamin Franta is an Associate Professor of Climate Litigation, the founding head of the Climate Litigation Lab, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, a joint programme of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment and the Faculty of Law at Oxford University. The Climate Litigation Lab is a multidisciplinary research initiative to inform, enable, and accelerate climate change litigation globally. Ben is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford.
Ben holds a JD from Stanford Law School and is a licensed attorney with the California State Bar, a PhD in History of Science from Stanford University, a separate PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University, an MSc in Archaeological Science from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Physics and Mathematics from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He is also a former research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
He is the recipient of numerous academic and research fellowships including the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the U.S. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, the USAID Research and Innovation Fellowship, the University of Oxford Clarendon Scholarship, and the Coe College Williston Jones Scholarship.
His research and writing have appeared in 10 languages, been featured in the Paramount+ documentary Black Gold, been cited in the U.S. Congressional Record, and been published in numerous scholarly and popular venues including Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change, The Guardian, Project Syndicate, and more. Links to his work are below.