Litigating the Climate Emergency: How Human Rights, Courts, and Legal Mobilization Can Bolster Climate Action

As the climate emergency intensifies, rights-based climate cases – litigation that is based on human rights law – are becoming an increasingly important tool for securing more ambitious climate action. This book is the first to offer a systematic analysis of the universe of these cases known as human rights and climate change (HRCC) cases. By combining theory, empirical documentation, and strategic debate among preeminent scholars and practitioners from around the world, the book captures the roots, legal innovations, empirical richness, impact, and challenges of this dynamic field of sociolegal practice. It looks specifically at the sociolegal origins and trajectory of HRCC cases, the legal innovations of this type of litigation, and the strategies and impacts of these cases. In doing so, this book equips litigators, researchers, practitioners, students, and concerned citizens with an understanding of an important method of holding governments and corporations accountable for climate harms. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

César Rodríguez-Garavito is a Professor of Clinical Law,and the Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. He is the Director of the Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic and the Climate Litigation Accelerator at NYU Law. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Open Global Rights and has published widely on international human rights, climate change, environmental justice, socioeconomic rights, and social movements. He has been an expert witness of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; an Adjunct Judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia; a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon; and a lead litigator in climate change, socioeconomic rights, and Indigenous rights cases.