The Indirect Impacts of Climate Litigation

In this episode of Between Heat and Hope we are joined by Professor César Rodriguez-Garavito. César Rodriguez-Garavito is Professor of Law at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law. He is the founding director of the More-Than-Human Life Program, the Earth Rights Research & Action Clinic, and the Commons on Machines, Policy, Automation & Society at NYU Law. His work focuses on international environmental law, Indigenous peoples’ rights, technology, and more-than-human rights. In 2025, Cesar published Climate Change on Trial: Mobilizing Human Rights Litigation to Accelerate Climate Action with Cambridge University Press.

The conversation explores the indirect impacts of climate litigation and the ways in which climate cases shape politics, public discourse, and the democratic process beyond the courtroom. Cesar reflects on his trajectory from socio-economic rights and socio-environmental conflicts to climate litigation and the rights of nature. Throughout the talk, we compare the development of climate litigation in Europe with experiences from Latin America and other regions of the world, discussing how different legal cultures and political contexts shape climate cases.

Drawing on Cesar’s earlier work on judicial activism and socio-economic rights, we discuss the distinction between direct and indirect effects of litigation, as well as the material and symbolic dimensions of climate judgments. We also explore the emergence of a global “litigation ecosystem,” where lawyers, scientists, activists, and communities increasingly collaborate across jurisdictions and disciplines. From the KlimaSeniorinnen judgment before the European Court of Human Rights to broader questions of standing, representation, and access to justice, the episode reflects on the democratic implications of climate litigation and the risks and opportunities of rights-based approaches to the climate crisis. Finally, Cesar shares his thoughts on the future of climate litigation and the transformative potential that climate cases may still hold.

Recommendations

Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, Climate Change on Trial: Mobilizing Human Rights Litigation to Accelerate Climate Action (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito (2011) Beyond the Courtroom: The Impact of Judicial Activism on Socioeconomic Rights in Latin America, Texas Law Review, 89 (7), 1669 – 1698.

Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (Penguin, 2025).

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (Penguin, 2019).

About

Editing: Clara Kammeringer

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, April 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).

Standing at the European Court of Human Rights

In this episode of Between Heat and Hope we are join by Professor Corina Heri. Corina Heri is Associate Professor of human rights and climate change at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Primary Investigator of the TEMPORALAW project. In this capacity she works on human rights law, climate change, the role of courts as well as the role of vulnerability in the law.

The conversation sets out discussing climate litigation before the European Court of Human Rights and particularly looks at different questions related to access to court and what kind of applicants can and should bring climate cases. Corina walks us through her critique of climate litigation exclusively being brought by associations as flattening the claims that can be made that way. From KlimaSeniorinnen we look to the wider set of climate cases before the ECtHR and discuss how Duarte Agostinho, Greenpeace Nordic, and possible the pending case Müllner v Austria fit into the puzzle and what they tell us about the Court’s approach to the climate crisis. Corina also shares some more structural insights on the functioning of the Court in relation to its narrative of limited resources and how that impacts its treatment of climate cases. Finally, we get a taste of the questions Corina’s new project TEMPORALAW will investigate.

References

KlimaSeniorinnen

Duarte Agostinho

Greenpeace Nordic

Müllner v Austria

Corina Heri, ‘Climate-related vulnerabilities and the European Court of Human Rights: Reimagining victim status through intersectional thinking’ (2025) 38/5 Leiden Journal of International Law, 88.

TEMPORALAW, Corina Heri PI (funded by the Research Foundation Flanders, Odysseus scheme)

Recommendations

Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017).

Law at the End of the World (Podcast)

About

Editing: Simon Waswa

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, April 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).

A Law and Political Economy Approach to Climate Litigation

In this episode, Ioannis Kampourakis, Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and co-director of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) in Europe project joins Rena Hänel, PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam, to talk about what is to be learned from applying a Law and Political Economy lens to climate litigation.

The episode begins with Ioannis describing the theoretical foundations of Law and Political Economy as a stream of legal scholarship that emphasizes the law as being constitutive of markets and the economy more generally. He then applies these insights to explain both how law has helped to create and sustain unsustainable economic patterns at the root of the climate crisis, and how climate litigation could harness the transformative potential of the law by focusing on what he calls structural enablers of economic power.

The conversation then turns to the practical work that the LPE in Europe project is doing with civil society organizations engaged in strategic litigation, including climate litigation, to integrate insights from scholarship into their legal strategies. In the end, Ioannis and Rena discuss ideas for potential future case strategies that could address the climate crisis as part of a wider "polycrisis" of climate change, widening economic inequality and wars, among others.

References

LPE in Europe Project

Urgenda

Milieudefensie v Shell

Lliuya v RWE

Workshop: Advancing a Law and Political Economy Approach to Strategic Litigation, LPE in Europe (2024)

Recommendations

Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, The spectre of state capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Thea Riofrancos, Extraction: The frontiers of green capitalism (WW Norton & Company, 2025).

David McDermott Hughes, Who Owns the Wind?: Climate crisis and the hope of renewable energy (Verso Books, 2021).

About

Editing: Martyna Durlik, Clara Kammeringer

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, February 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).