Climate Change on Trial: How Courts and Litigants Have Mobilized Human Rights to Accelerate Climate Action

Speaker: Professor César Rodríguez-Garavito, NYU School of Law.

This book tells the twenty-year socio-legal story of human rights-based climate change litigation. Based on an original database of the totality of rights-based climate change lawsuits around the world as well as interviews with leading actors and participant observation in the field, the book explains the rise and global diffusion of rights-based climate litigation. It combines insights from global governance, international law, climate policy, human rights, and legal mobilization theory in order to offer a socio-legal account of the actors, strategies, and norms that have emerged at the intersection of human rights and climate governance. 

By proposing a broad understanding of the impacts of legal mobilization that includes direct and indirect, material and symbolic effects, it documents the contributions and shortcomings of human rights litigation in addressing the climate emergency.

César Rodríguez-Garavito is Professor of Law and Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. He is the founding director of the Earth Rights Research & Action (TERRA) Clinic, the Climate Law Accelerator and the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at NYU Law. Professor Rodríguez-Garavito is an Earth rights and human rights scholar and a field lawyer whose work focuses on international environmental law, Indigenous peoples' rights, technology and more-than-human rights. 

His contributions to Earth rights have been recognized with a More-Than-Human Fellowship by the London Design Museum and a spot in the UN Museum's Top 10 Culture for Impact 2024 List. His most recent book is Climate Law on Trial: Mobilizing Human Rights Litigation to Accelerate Climate Action (Cambridge, 2025).