(iPoster) Chilling Effect in a Warming World: How the Threat of SLAPPs Shapes Climate Law

• In Event: Poster Session: Judicial Politics & Public Administration
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Judicial Politics

Abstract

Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) are meritless cases filed by powerful actors seeking to silence their critics through costly and protracted litigation. While early generations of SLAPPs were deployed to quash community resistance to industrial projects, deter company whistleblowers, and reign in investigative journalists, SLAPPs have been increasingly used to suppress human rights and environmental movements around the world. As climate change litigation (CCL) targeting corporations has grown exponentially in the decade since the Paris Agreement, so has the threat of retaliatory SLAPPs by corporations against climate activists. In the United States, activists seeking corporate accountability for climate impacts must weigh the threat of being entangled in a resource-depleting SLAPP in decisions around whether, and where, to file strategic CCL. In this paper, I leverage spatial and temporal variation in protections afforded by anti-SLAPP statutes enacted in 34 states and the District of Columbia as of 2024 to test how such statutes affect activists’ willingness to file corporate CCL in state and federal court. I perform my analysis on a dataset comprising all corporate CCL in US courts between 2015 and 2024. My results suggest that by attracting CCL to jurisdictions with anti-SLAPP protections, state legislators’ actions in the domain of free speech have major implications for the development of climate law in the United States. This effect is notable in light of political barriers to climate policy in many states.

Author

• Timothy Daniel Arvan, University of Michigan