Transnational litigation

Litigation has been a point of emphasis for transnational legal scholarship since the origin of the field in Philip Jessup's 1956 Storrs Lectures. This entry maps the many forms of engagement that transnational legal scholars have had with litigation processes, both before domestic and international adjudicatory forums. Private interest groups act as influential drivers of international litigation between states in the World Trade Organization's dispute resolution mechanism. In contrast, litigation is also an important process for checking the private interests of economic actors driving globalization, as illustrated in the rise of transnational public law litigation, which applies human rights norms and other public law rules to the transnational actions of corporate entities, and transnational climate litigation. The spread of class action opportunities has also resulted in various forms of coordinated, multi-jurisdictional ‘global class actions’. Finally, the entry discusses methods of legal analysis that amplify transnational aspects of otherwise domestic litigation.