2023 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Learning to think like a climate crisis lawyer: When case-based legal education engages with the Anthropocene thought experiment
| Project/Area Number |
22K01275
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
イザベル ジロドウ 東京大学, 大学院総合文化研究科, 准教授 (70713072)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2022-04-01 – 2025-03-31
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| Keywords | Litigation narratives / Legal imaginaries / Coal litigation cases / Judicialisation / Anthropocene Legalities / Chronotopographies / Legal reasoning / Legal education |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Using preliminary and secondary sources as well as my gathered material so far (mostly from interviews and participant observations), I reconstructed the competing narratives at stake in the emergent judicialisation of climate change in Japan, which led to the publication of one co-edited special issue as well as several peer-reviewed articles and conference papers discussing various 'coal litigation' cases and putting the elaboration of recent climate litigation strategies further into critical perspective. Expanding my research network with scholars from France (CNRS), Germany, and Indonesia, I recently started to broaden the scope of my investigation into litigation strategies to some selected aspects of sustainability disputes, just transition litigation, and biodiversity litigation.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
1: Research has progressed more than it was originally planned.
Reason
By expanding on the notion of ‘response-abilities’, as recently proposed by a few critical legal theorists, I both 1) reconstructed the narratives and counter-narratives strategically deployed by different stakeholders in four coal litigation cases in Japan, and 2) assessed the extent to which legal reasoning can be stretched when confronted to the specific legal disruptions caused by a continuously rising risk of more frequent and higher-impact climate change-induced extreme events. Contemplating whether the emergence of a novel litigation imaginary, based inter alia on different chronotopographies, can further energize climate (but also biodiversity and energy transition) litigation strategies requires a more thorough investigation. I will now focus on filling these gaps in my research, aiming to complete it as scheduled.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I plan to expand further on two of the most thought-provoking conceptual and methodological frameworks currently experimented in critical environmental law, namely: ‘Anthropocene Legalities’ and the relationist/relational approach to law.
My main aim is to assess the extent to which such frameworks both:
1) help enrich the description and critical analysis of the transforming ‘environmental judicialisation’ discourse in Japan (with a focus on the practical and theoretical conditions at which novel climate change litigation narratives can be deployed);
2) contribute to open legal education (through non-monodisciplinary settings) up to the recognition of a shared human-nonhuman agency and coexistence, hence new forms of relationality.
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| Causes of Carryover |
My main research expenses during the fiscal year in question will be those stemming from 1) conducting my research overseas (in particular, covering several interviews, fieldwork activities, and appointments for exchanges in the UK, France, The Netherlands, and Belgium), and 2) organizing one research seminar and an international workshop.
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