Climate Change Litigation

By J. Peel, H. Osofsky. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2015

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate change litigation has grown exponentially in the last decade, paralleled by the emergence of a rich legal and social sciences literature assessing these cases. Building on a recent review in WIRES Climate Change, this article evaluates the growth of this literature and the key themes it highlights. In 2019, climate litigation literature experienced substantial growth, with a focus on multiple novel dimensions: new high-profile judgments; emerging legal avenues, types of actors, litigation objectives, and jurisdictions, especially those in the Global South; and additional interdisciplinary analyses. Just as in the underlying case law, climate litigation scholarship shows evidence of distinct but overlapping waves that build together in a manner similar to a harmonic chord. Even so, this literature has not yet engaged deeply with questions about the effectiveness of climate litigation as a governance tool, particularly in the context of the decentralized system formalized with the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d337c7f098ad45e4afb4b3a3e412b9dff02a125e