Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Environmental and climate protection legislation has been and still is often somewhat unambitious, and indeed too unambitious to achieve climate goals that natural science has identified to be even the outer limits of what our planet can bear.Thus, in many countries civil society has taken the initiative, trying to force legislators to take serious action, or even to make large companies stop their destructive operations or pay for damage done.Dutch courts have gained world-wide attention with progressive if not revolutionary decisions against both the Dutch legislator, in the case of Urgenda, and against Royal Dutch Shell, a prominent representative of the extracting industry.In turn, interference by courts has sometimes been criticised as upsetting the division of powers between government and the judiciary, thus, the democracy principle.Be that as it may, these judgments certainly have not only inspired Dutch academics to delve deep into the topic of climate litigation but also fuelled academic discussion, and ultimately litigation, in Germany.Following a workshop in Oldenburg mainly with participants from two partner universities, the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, but also with friends from Copenhagen, Kassel and Lüneburg, and complemented with written contributions by distinguished colleagues from Groningen and Ferrara, this special issue engages in a kind of dialogue between Dutch, German, and Italian academics around the prospects of climate litigation but also the broader picture of environmental and climate governance and its economic environment.The first two articles of this special issue focus on the topic of climate litigation, or environmental litigation, against private actors.Axel Halfmeier (Leuphana University of Lüneburg), in his article on 'Environmental Private Law' , recalls and critically discusses the various theories of why, or why not, european journal of comparative law and governance 10 (2023) 283-287
Authors: Peter Rott, Aurelia Colombi Ciacchi
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4388744225