Making the evidence count: Climate Science in the Courtroom

This project will show how climate change attribution science shapes climate litigation through a socio-legal analysis of evidentiary arguments in major influential lawsuits. My findings will support judicial adjudication and the development of effective legal arguments that are grounded in scientific insight.

Climate change science is crucial for developing solutions addressing global warming, yet translating scientific climate knowledge into concrete action remains a significant challenge. Litigation has achieved increasing success for demanding climate action from governments and corporations, but academics and legal practitioners have a severely limited understanding of how climate science shapes judicial arguments and outcomes.

By unveiling the role of attribution science in climate litigation, this project makes a critical contribution to discussions about how scientific climate knowledge should inform legal and political decision-making. The project has three aims. I want to understand: - How litigants translate climate knowledge between scientific and legal frameworks;

- How the legal context shapes scientific argumentation in court; and - How attribution arguments affect legal outcomes.

This project uses a qualitative socio-legal approach to examine how litigants and judges apply attribution science in the context of climate litigation. It will contribute an empirically grounded analytical framework to study scientific argumentation in the legal process. This will provide an understanding of how attribution science shapes climate litigation and addresses the broader question of how climate change knowledge should inform legal and political decision-making.

The project has three concrete objectives:

- To understand how litigants translate scientific climate knowledge into a legal framework, I will analyse how they use attribution science to make legal causation arguments,

- To understand how legal context shapes scientific argumentation in court, I will compare attribution-based causation arguments between jurisdictions, type of law applied, legal stage, setting (e.g., written filings, oral arguments, statements outside the courthouse),

- To understand how scientific arguments affect legal outcomes, I will examine how judges interpret scientific causality arguments in their verdicts, rulings, and oral remarks.

This project will improve the theoretical and empirical basis for understanding how attribution science shapes the process and outcome of climate litigation. My analytical framework can be used for future research on the use of climate research and other scientific knowledge in litigation. I will share my research results with the legal community to help litigators make stronger arguments and help judges make better informed decisions.