Law and Political Economy in Europe, in consultation with civil society partners, has been promoting and advancing a novel approach on strategic litigation that focuses on systemic enablers of economic power.
Through a series of events, we attempted to employ the LPE approach to:
a) identify and mobilise legal rules within the deeper structures of the institutional system (e.g., enabling rules or rules of permission) to ground novel legal actions arising out of existing bodies of law (e.g. property law, contract law) in order to challenge the powers of corporate and financial actors
b) re-shape the professional consensus on the scope of potential legal actions by mobilising the indeterminacy of legal concepts to create new hooks for litigation (e.g., ‘property rights’)
c) mobilise public opinion and build narratives that re-politicise legal frameworks and disturb ‘settled’ understandings of the law in order to create the conditions for favourable ‘purposive’ judicial interpretation that seeks to interpret law in line with contemporary values and purposes.
