Abstract As corporate climate litigation intensifies globally, litigants consistently encounter the same procedural and substantive hurdles: duty of care, standing and causation. Success in navigating these hurdles has been sporadic, and most existing inquiry has sought to understand these trends according to geographical or case‐type lenses. This article proposes a different framework, contending that grouping cases by legal family (common law vs. civil law) provides a more illuminating lens for examining litigation developments. Performing a systematic review of the Sabin Center's Climate Case Chart Database, this study isolates relevant tort or tort‐equivalent based corporate climate cases and compares their multi‐stage outcomes across both legal traditions. The analysis reveals that civil law jurisdictions navigate judicial hurdles more effectively than their common law counterparts, suggesting that without procedural reform, common law climate suits will continue to stagnate. The article concludes by identifying potential doctrinal developments in the common law that could, where appropriate, draw on the approaches that have proven workable in civil law jurisdictions.
Calum Maclaren (Mon,) studied this question.