Voices of the Future: Reconstructing Youth Rhetoric in Climate Change Case Law 

Climate change affects everything. It threatens the way we live, interact, and organise ourselves as societies. Law is one of the instruments that seeks to address these threats and can enhance the sustainability of our societies. Youth, however, find themselves largely outside this domain as they lack voting rights. Despite this, youths assert an important role in this debate by speaking up and demanding robust climate change policies through climate litigation.

This project examines the role of rhetoric in youth climate litigation by taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines legal, rhetorical, and social movement studies theories and methods. We will study the national and international legal frameworks for such litigation, the rhetoric used, and the legal and public reception of this rhetoric.

Together this will help us uncover how youth rhetoric influences broader societal adaptation to climate change. In addition, we seek to answer the question whether youth, as one of the groups most affected by climate change, should have a special position in climate litigation.
To do so, we will use global youth climate litigation to construct archetypical cases that we will then test for their reception among Groningen youth. We will examine what rhetoric resonates with local youth, and what the legal implication of this reception can and should be.

The co-applicants Olthof and Vedder are experienced researchers in the field of environmental law and communication. Proposed PhD-candidate Muir is a graduate of the LLM Energy and Climate Law and works as research assistant in the NWO-funded XS project that created the database of case law used.
By combining expertise in youth rhetoric (Olthof and Muir) and (empirical) legal research (Vedder and Muir) the team is uniquely suited to develop this interdisciplinary research project to better understand the way societies adapt to climate change, in Groningen and beyond.

Contact person at our Faculty

prof. mr. dr. H.H.B. (Hans) Vedder