TEMPORALAW @ VUB

About

TEMPORALAW is an FWO-funded research project based at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Brussels. The project investigates how legal responses to climate change engage with the factor of time. Over the course of five years (2026-2031), it will engage with the temporal assumptions underlying human rights law, and the law more generally, as exemplified through rights-based climate litigation. The project melds critical, comparative and socio-legal approaches and builds around a central conceptual framework. This allows it to make existing temporal assumptions and limitations explicit, and to propose alternative concepts and argumentation strategies. By doing so, the project aims to produce insights into the legal treatment of scientific evidence, standards of due diligence, victimhood, risk and causation, and both inter- and intra-generational justice, as well as reconceptualizing approaches to (dynamic, evolutive) legal interpretation and the possibilities and limits of the law. It also engages with the legal, epistemic, institutional and political constraints on implementing future-oriented, temporally inclusive approaches.