This article departs from doctrinal exegesis of the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on climate change to reflect, from the “cockpit” of the process that produced it, on how impact was conceived throughout the campaign, the drafting of the request and the conduct of the proceedings. It argues that a central strategic objective was not simply to secure a symbolically powerful statement of law, but to trigger legal tipping points within domestic systems. Four such tipping points were given close consideration: the individualisation of the relevant conduct; the integration of cumulative and downstream effects into project-level assessment of new fossil fuel developments; the clarification of adaptation obligations and their distributive implications; and the harnessing of human rights law as a vehicle for domestic remedies, including claims concerned with reparation.
Vinuales et al. (Fri,) studied this question.