Date: 2022
Type: Article
Environmental justice “light”? : transnational tort litigation in the corporate anthropocene
German law journal, 2022, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 738-755
BERTRAM, Daniel Alexander, Environmental justice “light”? : transnational tort litigation in the corporate anthropocene, German law journal, 2022, Vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 738-755
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/74808
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
Corporations are notoriously powerful actors in the current configuration of our globalized economy. Their activities play a key role in shaping a new age of ecological precarity—the Anthropocene. Much of this environmental damage occurs in cross-border settings, hampering victims’ access to legal remedies due to widespread corporate impunity and institutional hurdles in host states. Several transnational lawsuits have recently tested the willingness of European home state judiciaries to adjudicate the extraterritorial conduct of domestic corporations. To contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this novel phenomenon, this article analyzes three legal sagas from a comparative perspective: Vedanta v. Lungowe (England & Wales), Dooh v. Shell (The Netherlands) and Lliuya v. RWE (Germany). It argues that transnational tort suits remain a problematic vehicle for the attainment of procedural and substantial environmental justice. The inherent limitations of tort law, extra-legal hurdles to transnational litigation, and the socio-cultural contingency of legal institutions severely circumscribe the space for legal contestations of the corporate Anthropocene.
Additional information:
Published online: 29 June 2022
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/74808
Full-text via DOI: 10.1017/glj.2022.45
ISSN: 2071-8322
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Sponsorship and Funder information:
This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2020-2022)
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