Description
Who has the ability to tell stories via the law? What is the narrative impact of legal storytelling? These questions, and more, prompted the birth of Law and Narrative literature within the American legal academy in the 1980s, making a contribution to the overall 'narrative turn' in research across the humanities (Goodson and Gill 2011). Today, with an increase in attention on legal storytelling, social movement strategic litigators consider storytelling to be a key consideration when bringing a case and maximising effective impact (Fisher 2025).
These questions of narrative impact are only now beginning to be applied to climate change litigation (De Spiegleir 2025; Wewerinke-Singh and Ramsay 2024). Climate change narratives in the law ask us to question who is affected by the climate disaster and who is ‘deserving’ of their day in court. As such, I argue that there is a need to draw upon the insights of worldmaking to examine the construction of these narratives in climate litigation. How do climate stories in the law act as a site of worldmaking for participants, litigators, and courts? Who is involved in the construction of these stories? Through the use of interviews with participants in litigation and text analysis of legal documents, I aim to examine who is empowered to make new worlds in the law and how the language we use creates our climate future(s).
