This chapter turns from the legal to the sociolegal to offer a different lens through which to consider the phenomenon of climate change litigation. By drawing on theoretical approaches in the study of legal mobilization, this chapter sheds light on some of the social and political dynamics of climate change litigation. I suggest that situating climate change litigation in its social and political context is useful in gaining a more holistic understanding of what is at stake when individuals and groups turn to the courts as part of their efforts to address the climate crisis. Drawing on the contributions to this volume, this chapter (1) shows how legal mobilization theory can be helpful to practitioners and scholars interested in understanding, explaining, and assessing climate change litigation in practice, and (2) highlights some of the ways in which studying climate change litigation can shape our conceptual and empirical understandings of processes of legal mobilization more generally.

Chapter 1 lays the theoretical, methodological, and contextual foundations of this book. First, an overview is provided of the book’s key arguments, as well as its contribution to existing studies and debates. The chapter then offers a detailed rethinking of conventional wisdom about each of the book’s central themes: childhood, law, and human rights. Children, it argues, are not simply a preexisting group with inherently unique traits and needs but, rather, are a category largely manufactured by social forces. Key among these forces are law and children’s rights, both of which, for reasons explained in this chapter, have been complicit in state domination and violence. From there, the chapter places the subject matter in its political context. This is done by outlining the varying modes and degrees of control that Israeli authorities exercise over each of the following territories: Israel “proper” (within its pre-1967 borders), East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The methodology of this study is then discussed, and the book’s sources are described, along with the decisions that were taken in interpreting them, as well as the inaccessibility of some sources. Finally, an outline of the next chapters is provided.