Fossil fuel companies no longer deny anthropogenic climate change in litigation, but they challenge the validity of climate science in establishing legal responsibility. Research on climate litigation, social movements, and legal mobilization has focused primarily on plaintiffs’ perspectives, showing how they use the judicial process as a site of knowledge production. This article shifts the focus onto defendants, conducting an analysis of scientific disputes in major climate change lawsuits and developing a typology grounded in both empirical analysis and theoretical insights for studying their arguments about science and evidence. Corporate defendants build evidentiary counter-narratives, challenge the substantive quality of plaintiffs’ claims, and contest the scientific integrity of compromising evidence. The future impact of such litigation will hinge on how courts evaluate climate research as legal evidence, and whether corporate defendants are successful in their efforts to reframe, undermine, and discredit the science.

The set of person and number features necessary to characterize the pronominal paradigms of the world's languages is highly constrained, and their interaction is demonstrably systematic. We develop a geometric representation of morphosyntactic features which provides a principled explanation for the observed restrictions on these paradigms. The organization of this geometry represents the grammaticalization of fundamental cognitive categories, such as reference, plurality, and taxonomy. We motivate the geometry through the analysis of pronoun paradigms in a broad range of genetically distinct languages.

The Korean writer Chang Hyŏkju, who first rose to fame in 1930s Tokyo, sparked interest, translation, critique, and controversy among intellectuals throughout East Asia. Recent scholarship has conducted comparative studies of the perception of Chang Hyŏkju in Japan, Taiwan, Shanghai, and his native Korea, respectively. The present study brings one more dimension to research on Chang by discussing Chinese translations of his works that appeared in the puppet state Manchukuo (1931–1945). I place these texts in conversation with other local Chinese translations of Korean writing. Central to this story is a debate that surfaced among Chinese writers in Manchuria about what should constitute the literature of the region. Within this debate, the act of translating Korean writing became a space to work out the kinds of narratives that mattered, yet it was inexorably linked with the power struggles inherent to Manchukuo’s racial (dis)harmony as well. The texts discussed throughout this study reveal the value of Chinese and Korean textual exchange in Manchukuo and, by extension, how these intellectuals viewed the purpose of literature vis-à-vis modern nation-building. Such a reading allows for a nuanced understanding of the interplay between ethnic nationalism and cultural production. In the story told here, the Chinese and Korean ethnicities take on distinct political and cultural meanings depending on interlocutor and context, belying post-war narratives of inevitable ethno-nationalist triumph over the Japanese empire.