Adjudicating Climate Change

Adopting a multidisciplinary approach to identify extra-legal factors that may drive decision-making processes and outcomes, this book uses case studies to address climate cases across the world.

This volume considers the important role that judges can play in responding to the global challenge of climate change. Rather than focusing on how judges are employing legal doctrine to adjudicate climate change, chapters in this volume explore an array of factors beyond the law that influence what happens inside courtrooms when climate change is adjudicated.

These ‘extra-legal factors’ include judges’ psychology and their socio-economic and educational backgrounds, judicial appointment processes, legal culture and legal philosophy, as well as and various influences on who brings litigation on climate change issues before judges, the evidence they adduce and the strategies they employ, including literature and counter-hegemonic knowledge production, political economy, political ecology, history and climate science.

Authors explore the influence of extra-legal factors in a multidisciplinary manner from Global South and Global North perspectives – drawing on case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and North America and Oceania.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Newcastle Law School (United Kingdom), the Department of Land Economy, Cambridge and Queens’ College, Cambridge.