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Fossil fuel companies are no longer denying anthropogenic climate change in recent climate litigation but question the validity of climate science for establishing legal responsibility. Past research on social movement legal mobilization has primarily focused on plaintiffs perspectives, showing how they use the judicial process as a site of knowledge production. Drawing attention to the other side, I conduct an analysis of scientific disputes in major climate change lawsuits and develop a typology for studying defendants evidentiary arguments. Defendants build evidentiary counter-narratives, challenge the substantive quality of plaintiffs claims, and attack the scientific integrity of compromising evidence. Litigants legal narratives and factual claims are linked to broader normative concerns about how the underlying issues should be resolved. Fossil fuel companies legal arguments reflect broader strategies to evade responsibility for climate change.
Noah Walker-Crawford (Fri,) studied this question.