The Struggle for Law: legal strategies, environmental struggles and climate actions in Italy

The legal field constitutes both an advantageous and restrictive tool for social struggles. Current movements trust law and litigation as beneficial instruments. Nevertheless, legal strategies are deployed against protestors too. This article stems from processes of criminalization and unsuccessful “struggle for law” towards cases where legal strategies are embraced by social movements to demonstrate the Janus-faced nature of the legal field. The focus is on Italy, and is based on two-year judicial ethnography on the No TAV movement and fieldwork as well as documental analysis on the anti-Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) mobilization. Hence, the analysis focuses on a “positive” case selection, namely the most relevant climate litigation strategies pursued worldwide, with a special focus on Giudizio Universale, the first Italian action. The goal is to grasp both the conflicting aspects and the resourceful nature of law through empirical cases and case law to evaluate potential successful practices for current social movements.