Life, Liberty, and Litigation: Do Constitutional Rights Impact Climate Litigation Outcome?

Climate change litigants have been increasingly deploying existing legal and constitutional structures, and particularly the rights to life and a healthy environment, prompting judiciaries around the world to confront issues of climate change in their interpretation of these constitutional rights. Do these constitutional rights have any positive impact on climate litigation? To what extent do the rights to life and to a healthy environment enhance climate justice by increasing more successful climate litigation? Using an original data set of 1,855 litigation cases from 1992 to 2021, we find robust empirical evidence that while stock of climate laws and the constitutional right to a healthy environment do not have any impact on the outcome of climate lawsuits, the right to life can enhance the success rate of these lawsuits. We argue that climate litigation has extended the scope of the right to life—certainly beyond what John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and other theorists of natural rights envisioned—to include environmental and climate rights and successfully claim that governments’ climate inactions (in lowering greenhouse gas emissions, for example) pose serious threat towards people’s right to life.