Abstract

Climate litigation has outgrown the domestic courtroom. This edited volume, produced within the Climate Litigation Observatory of the Lisbon Public Law Research Centre, asks how five international legal systems (the United Nations system, the Inter-American, European and African human rights systems, and the Court of Justice of the European Union) have received climate claims, first on the substance (legal grounds) and then on procedure (standing). Its eleven chapters pair each system with a substantive and a procedural study and close with a comparative chapter whose central thesis is that legal culture, more than formal fragmentation, explains why the same planetary problem fares so differently from one forum to another. The review finds the book’s architecture original and its best chapters, notably Stoyanova’s dissection of causation in KlimaSeniorinnen and the empirical census of 196 climate cases before the CJEU, of lasting value. It also notes that the book went to press just before the International Court of Justice’s 2025 advisory opinion, that investment arbitration and the Energy Charter Treaty fall outside its frame, and that several editorial slips deserve correction. For energy lawyers, the volume is an indispensable map of the forums in which fossil fuel decisions will increasingly be judged.

Carla Amado Gomes, Heloísa Oliveira, Armando Rocha and Matteo Fermeglia (eds), Climate Change before International Courts: A Comparative Study (Routledge Research in International Environmental Law, Routledge 2026), xiv + 280 pp, ISBN 978-1-032-86789-2 (hbk), 978-1-003-54097-7 (ebk), DOI 10.4324/9781003540977.