Climate change affects everyone, everywhere. But the way we deal with it—especially in court—is mostly local. Lawsuits over climate issues usually happen in national or regional courts, using local laws. Meanwhile, climate change is a global problem, with impacts that cross borders and generations. This creates a big challenge: how do we balance the need for global justice with the limits of local democracy?

Litigation is one of the key places where people fight for justice. It’s where claims are made, argued, and decided—and those decisions shape our democratic systems. But in the climate crisis, justice and democracy don’t always align neatly. While climate justice demands a global view, democratic institutions are built to serve national interests.

Three speakers take different perspectives in a round table discussion on how climate litigation may or may not contribute to bringing an international justice perspective to the domestic decision-making process on climate matters. They defend different perspectives on how the tension between democracy and justice should be reconciled.

About the speakers 

Peter van Dam is professor of Dutch history at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the history of civic initiative and activism as well as the history of historiography. His current research revolves around the question how people have tried to make the world more sustainable: Which problems did they identify? And how have they translated their hopes and fears initiatives to shape their societies?  

Christina Eckes is professor of European law at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG). Her current research interest is strategic climate litigation’s direct and indirect consequences for the democratic process in the multi-layered legal landscape of Europe. Her most recent publications examine the legal and factual exceptionalism of climate litigation, climate constitutionalisation, and the normative relevance of climate science in litigation. 

Phillip Paiement is Professor of Law & Governance in the Anthropocene at Tilburg Law School. Since September 2022 he is the Principal Investigator in the ERC Starting Grant funded project ‘TransLitigate: The Agency of Transnational Strategic Litigators in Global Environmental Governance’. The project combines doctrinal and qualitative socio-legal methods to study the transnational collaborative networks of strategic litigators work on climate change, pollution from the extractive industries, biodiversity conservation, and land conflicts. 

Melanie Jean Murcott (moderator) is an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town. Her research recognises that a functioning and flourishing environment creates the conditions in which social justice can occur. It focuses on environmental law, including how the law can be more responsive to the socio-ecological reality that climate crisis is causing social, environmental, and climate injustice. Much of her research is about how the causes and impacts of climate change violate and undermine the fulfilment of human rights, particularly in the Global South.