The project’s aims

Translitigate is composed of three inter-related research aims which are described below, followed by the project methodology.

Modes of collaboration

The first aim of TransLitigate is to identify the factors and conditions that determine when strategic environmental litigators collaborate transnationally. In particular, we focus on whether and when they collaborate in the following facets of litigation:

  • Developing and presenting evidentiary materials

  • Constructing interpretations of similar national legal frameworks and doctrines

  • Constructing interpretations of commonly shared supranational legal frameworks

  • Litigation strategizing, e.g. selecting the case, forum, claim, and/or procedure

Issue control in collaborative networks

The second aim is to assess how collaborative relationships affect the agency of litigators as they seek to:

  • Achieve ‘issue control’ within their networks with respect to how cases are developed, including the legal foundations and evidentiary materials that are relied upon

  • Negotiate the interests of the organization or client bringing the case and the interests of fellow litigators working in the field

  • Utilize their double position in both national and transnational fields of legal practice

  • Formulate long-term strategies that in term orient choices in immediate cases

Professional-ethical reflections

The final aim of TransLitigate is to evaluate how litigators make ethical sense of the shared goals and theory of change in their field and, when necessary, respond to diverging accounts among their peers. It situates these ethical reflections within three contexts of the litigator’s work:

  1. their specific cases

  2. the organizational interests of their clients

  3. the national and transnational fields of governance in which their interventions are situated

Project Methodology

TransLitigate utilizes a combination of doctrinal and qualitative empirical methods across four case studies of environmental litigation: climate change, pollution from extractives’ industries, biodiversity conservation, and land conflicts.

Doctrinal research is used in each case study to identify prominent opportunities and challenges for litigation in a selection of jurisdictions with substantial legal activism. Subsequently, qualitative empirical methods - including interviews with litigators and documentary analysis - are used to collect data about the characteristics of their collaborative work.

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