FWO Odysseus: TEMPORALAW

TEMPORALAW is an FWO-funded research project that investigates how legal responses to climate change engage with time (both the past and the future, including historical emissions and future impacts). Over the course of five years (2026-2031), the project engages with the temporal assumptions underlying human rights law, and the law more generally, as exemplified through rights-based climate litigation. This climate science-informed project combines critical, comparative and socio-legal approaches and builds around a central conceptual framework, allowing it to make existing temporal assumptions and limitations explicit. In turn, this allows the project to propose alternative concepts and argumentation strategies to existing climate litigation. By doing so, the project aims to produce insights into the legal treatment of scientific evidence, standards of due diligence, victimhood, risk and causation, and both inter- and intra-generational justice, as well as reconceptualizing approaches to (dynamic, evolutive) legal interpretation and the possibilities and limits of the law. It also engages with the legal, epistemic, institutional and political constraints on implementing future-oriented, temporally inclusive approaches.

For the project website, please see here.