The Agency of Transnational Strategic Litigators in Global Governance

Litigators feature in a crucial role as we confront the pressing global environmental governance challenges of the 21st Century. They possess an agency which is capable of driving the evolution and implementation of law across national boundaries and at the supranational level. This project proposes to develop a groundbreaking, explanatory model of transnational collaborations among strategic litigators which accounts for their modes of collaboration, how those collaborations affect their agency in controlling the issues in their respective fields, and how they negotiate complex ethical and professional challenges in their work. It proposes to develop this model through the combination of comparative doctrinal research and inductive qualitative socio-legal research across four case studies of strategic litigation: climate change, large-scale land transfers, pollution caused by extractives industries, and species conservation. It pursues the ground-breaking aim of explaining the multi-faceted and complex deliberations among transnational communities of litigators which give rise to and shape the landmark cases transforming environmental governance in diverse national contexts. With this contribution to the sociology of strategic litigators, the project will achieve a break-through in our understanding of how change can be initiated in legal systems to overcome perpetual obstacles and meet our global environmental challenges. It pursues a breakthrough in understanding how litigators drive states and their legal systems to act upon their ability to govern global environmental challenges, given the unlikeliness of it occurring through domestic and international lawmaking alone. In sum, the project aims to develop a groundbreaking model of an innovative type of agency and actor in global governance: the strategic litigator collaborating across borders.