Mobility Phase: European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg |University of Cambridge
Litigating for Change? The Role of Adjudication in Challenging Law and Policy
Corina Heri is assistant professor of constitutional and administrative law at Tilburg University, the Netherlands (since January 2025). She studied law at the University of Zurich (BLaw, MLaw, PhD) and King’s College London (LL.M.). Her PhD thesis concerned the concept of vulnerability in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, and was published in monograph form in 2021 under the title Responsive Human Rights: Vulnerability, Ill-treatment and the ECtHR by Hart Publishing. She has previously been a visiting researcher at Ghent University, the University of Auckland and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, as well as conducting a postdoctoral research project at the Amsterdam Center for International Law at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Corina's work has been published in leading international journals including International Journal of Human Rights, European Journal of International Law, Human Rights Law Review, and International and Comparative Law Quarterly. She is the co-deputy director for Europe of the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE) and sits on the editorial board of the ECHR Law Review and the Yearbook of International Environmental Law.
Litigating for Change? The Role of Adjudication in Challenging Law and Policy
When courts deliver divisive or progressive judgments, they regularly face allegations of judicial activism. Critical voices question whether the role of courts can properly encompass bringing about social and political change. They also invoke the limits of courts’ role within a democratic system characterized by the separation of powers. Providing satisfactory answers to these challenges can be difficult. Doing so involves competing understandings of the foundations of judicial power and democracy. These concepts remain, despite their core relevance for legal scholarship and practice, blurry. Often, these discussions come to a head concerning the role of fundamental rights. Cases where rights are mobilized in the pursuit of change are often described as ‘strategic’ or ‘public interest’ litigation, and their appropriateness is contested in different jurisdictions. To build a more robust account of the judicial role, this project works towards a better understanding of strategic or public interest litigation, and its impacts on the law. The project draws on a central case study – that of climate litigation – to do so. Integrating socio-legal, critical and comparative methods, the project works towards a more convincing account of whether, how, and when the courts can legitimately be expected to produce change.
