Empirical legal studies in EU law routinely, if not inevitably, engage with text. From the decisions of national courts applying EU law, applicants’ case filings, to the Court’s own jurisprudence, these texts are an invaluable source of information for researchers seeking to understand the dynamics involved in the shaping of EU law and its broader societal impact. Distilling relevant information from legal texts, however, is anything but trivial. Intended to serve as a reference manual, the chapter offers detailed guidelines to researchers of both law and political science interested in employing a text-as-data approach to the study of EU law. To this end, we elaborate on how to conceptualise real-life phenomena in a way that renders them conducive to measurement, providing practical guidance on hand-coding and the use of deep learning classifiers. Further, we address potential challenges arising in the specific context of EU law. This includes limitations to access to relevant documents, as well as ensuring inter-coder reliability in data collection efforts that require specialised legal expertise.

Chapter 12 offers a provocative and jurisprudentially ambitious argument: that sovereign equality requires states to submit to international adjudication or arbitration even in ordinary legal disputes that do not involve overlapping sovereign rights or powers.

How should scholars use the interviews they conducted for a research article or a book chapter? Is there a recommended style or format for presenting findings from qualitative research? Throughout the author’s ten years of interviews, these questions have seldom been raised. In every research process, there comes a point when authors turn to their data to begin writing about it, and yet this writing phase is rarely reflected upon in any meaningful way. This chapter offers some thoughts on the use of interviews in EU legal research. It first discusses expert interviews as a distinct category, particularly relevant to EU legal researchers. Expert interviews in EU legal scholarship typically address complex, embedded situations involving influential political and legal figures who are especially vulnerable to breaches of anonymity. These interviews are often part of research with significant policy relevance and implications beyond academia. The chapter then discusses how such expert interviews can be used. It provisionally explores three guiding principles: situatedness, transparency, and integrity for qualitative legal researchers writing both about and with interviews. It is fair to warn, however, that none of these principles offers quick fixes or guarantees of academic recognition or accolades.

Litigation makes the European Union’s (EU) legal order work: By claiming their EU rights, private and public actors can argue their case before the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and shape supranational policymaking. This chapter situates EU law litigation in comparative context to answer three questions: Who litigates EU law, who influences ECJ decisions, and with what downstream effects? Leveraging a dataset of 7,353 cases adjudicated by the ECJ, it compares whether well-established litigation patterns in the United States also arise in the EU and uncovers several illuminating patterns. First, EU law litigation is not only driven by resourceful business and trade associations, but also by a surprising abundance of resourceless individuals and a paucity of labor unions and advocacy groups. Second, individuals, labor unions, and trade associations are most effective in influencing the ECJ, but in counterintuitive ways: whereas labor unions and individuals prompt liberalising rulings that restrict national autonomy, trade associations prompt protectionist rulings. Finally, individuals and advocacy groups are better able to attract attention and shape downstream legal debates via litigation than businesses and trade associations. The “haves” are certainly protagonists of EU law litigation, but they are neither the sole nor the most effective protagonists.

Chapter 11 uses antitrust law as a case study to explore the phenomenon of extraterritorial regulation. It argues that the principle of sovereign equality requires states to resolve disputes involving fields of concurrent prescriptive jurisdiction through mandatory cooperation.

Introduction

Data convey information about greenhouse gas emissions, financial flows, and climate impacts. Such information is used to give meaning to the unfolding climate crisis and global efforts to respond to it. Moreover, data are assumed to increase transparency and accountability (see Gupta and van Asselt 2019), and related reporting and disclosure mechanisms work to facilitate continuous engagement with relevant governance fora and processes (Heyvaert 2018, 110–111). Importantly, in addition to supporting meaningmaking, transparency, accountability, and engagement, data themselves have emerged as a central means of climate change governance. They have become operational elements of institutionalized mobilization, organizing, and steering. At the global level, the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Secretariat, for example, relies on data to strategically structure governance processes, animate implementation activity, and coordinate between actor groups (Mai and Elsässer 2022), and at the transnational level, cross-border climate governance initiatives have begun to collect local climate data to position cities as central players in climate change governance (Mai 2024). Thus, rather than merely supporting or being the outputs of governance processes, data, in a very real sense, do governing work. They constitute and restructure relations between actors, create and sustain novel forms of power and authority, and disrupt existing modes of claiming legitimacy (see Johns 2021). This chapter refers to such governing work as the ‘datafication’ of climate change governance. As data transform ‘what counts as known, probable, certain, and in the process’ (Hong 2020, 1), they powerfully reconfigure existing and give rise to alternative modalities for governing.

In Africa, heads of government and civil society representatives have linked climate resilience to the urgent need to address the continent's debt crisis. The African Leaders Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change has called for a restructuring and relief from the debt as being essential to achieving climate goals, along with access to health and education (African Union 2023). A 2023 statement clarifies that Africa is bearing the social and economic brunt of global warming despite not being responsible for it. Dealing with the catastrophic effects of climate change on lives, livelihoods, and economies through loans is further exacerbating the ‘great financial divide’ between wealthy nations and African countries. This is neither sustainable nor just.

These negotiations reflect historical processes of social exclusion, economic dominance, and political control that have marginalized not just specific communities but also entire geographies. The climate discourse is not spared from this and remains vulnerable to reproducing inequities. The most recent reflection of this is Papua New Guinea's decision to withdraw from the 29th Climate Conference of Parties (COP29) calling it a ‘total waste of time’ (Bush 2024), as there remains inaction on the part of big emitters to reform the economic models to reduce emissions and rich nations to ensure _nancing.

Climate Justice seeks that the climate discourse reject exclusion and recognize marginalization of people and places. In doing so, it creates a complex process of embedding questions of power, hierarchy, fairness, and relief as necessary to understand climate change.

Introduction

India ranks seventh in the 2021 Global Climate Risk Index (Germanwatch 2021), and in 2017, it was the second most-affected country in terms of casualties related to extreme weather (Germanwatch 2017). Water pollution, food and water shortages (Niti Aayog 2019), waste management, and biodiversity loss (Kumari, Wate, and Anil 2014, 107) are just some of India's problems. Its large population coupled with a severe economic dependency on agriculture (FAO 2023) exposes it to severe vulnerabilities. Owing to its geography and high economic dependence on climate-sensitive sectors, India is one of countries most vulnerable to climate change (Harjeet Singh 2015). ‘Food security of India may be at risk in the future due to the threat of climate change leading to an increase in the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods, thereby affecting production of small and marginal farms.’ (Ministry of Environment and Forest 2009, 78). As a protector of people's rights, Indian courts are legally bound to protect the environment.

The chapter's research method involves an analysis of the literature and review of the judicial precedent. The chapter aims to compare the judicial precedents of the Supreme Court of India and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to understand the evolution of their response to environmental litigation.

Article 48A in the Constitution of India obliges the government to protect the environment and conserve the natural resources of the country.

Introduction

While initially piloted as the technology behind cryptocurrencies, the distributed ledger technology underlying Bitcoin, that is, blockchain, now extends to use cases beyond mere virtual currencies. Technologists and blockchain evangelists have been quick to overlook the excessive carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world's first cryptocurrency, and have attempted to expand the use cases of blockchain to areas beyond virtual currencies, finance, and payments (Huang, O’Neill, and Tabuchi 2021). This technology that brings together characteristics of decentralization, peer-to-peer computing, hash functions, asymmetric public–private key cryptography, and consensus algorithms to form a shared, immutable, and non-repudiable database is considered to have tremendous potential in fields such as identity and access management, healthcare, supply chain tracking, climate change, and so on (De Filippi and Wright 2018). Therefore, unsurprisingly, blockchain technology is now touted as the Panglossian solution to a myriad of problems ranging from financial inclusion to aid and climate change (Marke 2018).

This chapter attempts to ascertain whether the claims of blockchain as a solutionist technology for climate change, in reality, reflect and entrench the incumbent power asymmetries and the global digital divide in the guise of disintermediation and collective capitalism. This chapter applies the extant concepts of techno-colonialism and data colonialism to critically examine blockchain-based initiatives in the climate change sector.

Climate change has been duly recognized as a common concern of humankind (UNGA 1988). Nevertheless, its effects are not commonly shared. Instead, marginalized individuals, especially women in the Global South,1 have been primarily acknowledged to bear the brunt of climate degradation despite being less responsible for its advancement than individuals and nations in the Global North (UNGA 1992, Principle 7; Kakota et al. 2011; Singh, Feroze, and Ray 2013; Pearse 2017; MacGregor 2017). Against this background, efforts for addressing the differentiated impacts of climate change on the lives and livelihoods of Southern women have been mobilized at the international level, including through the issuing of dedicated decisions and programmes for action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (see, among others, COP of the UNFCCC 2010, 2017, 2021).

Within this broader debate, however, feminists have been wary that a disproportionate focus on the specific vulnerability of women to climate change can produce inadvertent effects in terms of policy discourse, negotiation, and design (see MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurreccion 2013; MacGregor 2017). For instance, feminist scholars have highlighted that this narrative has limited feminist transnational activism on climate change by fixating the frames of reference for women as poor subjects more vulnerable to the impacts and risks of climate change (MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurreccion 2013; MacGregor 2017).