Capacity Building Workshop on Strategic Litigation: Exploring the Potential of a Law and Political Economy Approach

This workshop has two key ambitions. First, to investigate the possible relevance of an LPE approach for advancing strategic litigation claims. Second, to lay the foundations for the development of tools that can nurture at collaboration between academic research and civil society interventions, including the creation of a European network for knowledge exchange that can help to promote a more joined up approach to strategic litigation.

The workshop aspires to discuss the relevance of a focus on the constitutive (and thus on the distributive and power-conferring) role of law for advancing strategic litigation claims. What might a Law and Political Economy approach, and a focus on the constitutive role of law in particular, mean for strategic litigation initiatives? Perhaps the challenge that LPE scholarship presents to the traditional division between ‘private’ and ‘public’ - as descriptors of activity and as legal fields – could be mobilized to recharacterize the nature of actors and/or actions of corporations, financial institutions, and governments for the purposes of litigation?  Could an illustration of how the constitutive role of law is relevant to the carrying out of harmful activities thereby implicate or trigger the legal responsibilities of a wider field of actors who could be pursued in the courts? Might a focus on constitutive role of law assist with the development of new argumentative patterns that could extend the reach of current laws to cover the actions of specific respondents and defendants?

List of Participants