Reimagining the energy corporation: Milieudefensie and others v Royal Dutch Shell Plc

The 2020 judgment in Milieudefensie and others v Royal Dutch Shell plc arose amid a second-wave of litigation and legal mobilizations against private corporations, such as oil and gas companies. Evaluating the judgment and its consequences in light of this broader wave of legal mobilizations, this chapter argues that these legal mobilizations effectively seek to re-imagine the contemporary energy corporation and its understandings of its profitability and accountability in a changing climate. Approaching the case from the context of other legal mobilizations undermines some of the key criticisms of the court’s judgment, namely its ineffectiveness in preventing climate-related harm and its failure to consider the common and best practices of oil and gas companies when substantiating Shell’s standard of care under Dutch tort law. Instead, Milieudefensie’s claim is positively evaluated for both presenting the Shell with the societal pressure that it purportedly depends upon for formulating more ambitious emissions reduction policies, and for forcing the court to confront the fundamental incompatibility of the contemporary energy corporations ‘business as usual’ with the protection of Dutch residents’ human rights in the climate crisis.