This article maps the shared legal anatomy of climate and environmental lawsuits, in which plaintiffs claim protection for future generations before domestic or international courts. By closely analyzing the litigation strategies of plaintiffs and the inquiry of courts, the article argues that these proceedings revolve around structurally similar legal standards across domestic and international jurisdictions, which correspond to five normative requirements flowing from the rule of law: namely, respect for human rights, certain quality of law requirements, prohibition of arbitrary exercise of governmental powers, non-discrimination, and access to justice. The cross-jurisdictional analysis shows that courts appear to be increasingly willing to protect future generations against arbitrary treatment by present-day decision makers. The article appraises whether such an intergenerationally sensitive reinterpretation of the rule of law could help to change the short-termist paradigm of environmental and climate law.

Environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) emerged in China over the last decade amidst the growing focus on environmental issues and the increasing political need to bring greater public participation to the area. This article examines the current practice of EPIL by NGOs in order to understand the potential flaws and deficiencies of NGO participation in this relatively new field of environmental litigation. The article sets out by exploring EPIL as a legal pathway for the public to become involved in China's environmental governance. It then analyzes the legal provision of environmental litigation in China before critically examining several instances of EPIL initiated by NGOs between 2015 and 2019. The article finds that NGOs show weaknesses in their current EPIL practice, including in case selection and litigation risk assessment, but are willing to test and potentially expand the scope of EPIL into new areas of environmental protection such as noise pollution and renewable energy. It concludes that these weaknesses and strengths of NGO involvement in EPIL reflect the constantly evolving landscape of environmental governance and environmental litigation in China.

In accordance with Article 15 of the Aarhus Convention, the first meeting of the parties to this Convention established a non-judicial and consultative Compliance Committee to consider, among other matters, individual cases concerning compliance by parties with their obligations. The Committee is traditionally viewed as a non-judicial, soft mechanism and its rulings as non-binding, soft law. In recent years, however, to support the claim that rulings of the Committee have an impact and legal effects, some scholars have departed from the traditional perspective and characterized the Committee as a more judicialized mechanism, which issues legally binding rulings.

This characterization assumes a correlation between judicialization and binding effect on the one hand, and legal effect on the other. The latter claim, however, has not been supported by a systematic assessment of the impact of the Committee's rulings on domestic practice. Against this background, the article assesses the impact of Article 9-related rulings of the Committee, issued between 2004 and 2012, on national legal orders. The assessment reveals that in fewer than 41% of the cases parties recorded some degree of compliance with the rulings of the Committee, whereas in 59% they recorded no progress. The quantitative assessment and respective qualitative insights, among other factors, suggest that the normative character of the Committee and its rulings play an auxiliary role in the process of ensuring compliance with the provisions of the Aarhus Convention. The decision of parties to comply is determined typically by the substance of the rulings as they stand in relation to domestic circumstances rather than by the institutional features of the Committee and binding effect of its rulings.

This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound, and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of people who lived there, but also through the production of a “nuclear sensorium”—the differentiation of modes of sensing the bomb through legal, military, and scientific discourses and the attribution of varying degrees of epistemological value and legal weight to these sensory modes.

This article investigates dynamics of mobilization over environmental and human rights norms in the context of undemocratic governments. We test the suggestion in norm diffusion theories that the success of domestic struggles in this context depends on the level of internalization of norms brought about by international pressure. We find that the internalization (or lack thereof) of global norms by the Government of Sudan does not explain its recognition of environmental justice claims in this case. Furthermore, the various litigation efforts pursued by affected people outside Sudan did not influence their campaign. However, a combination of the political climate in the country and a unique political interplay between the government and a distinct group of the affected people may have led to the singular success of their campaign. We use a combination of discourse analysis, legal analysis, norm mapping, and semi-structured interviews to reach conclusions.