Legal opportunity structures: Social movements in the European courts

Law is inherently political, and social movements and civil society have long mobilised in the courts to carve out legal rights for themselves and achieve their movement goals. Yet, in the EU, the intersection between law and social movements has remained relatively unexplored, even though its legal system provides unique opportunities and challenges for groups to mobilise through legal avenues. This chapter provides an overview of existing work on (EU) law and social movements, before focusing on the concept of legal opportunity structures and highlighting its potential utility in EU legal studies. It presents two case studies of climate change litigation in the European Court of Justice and in the European Court of Human Rights to examine how legal opportunities can be used in studying EU litigation. By drawing attention to structural conditions and the role of social movements in bringing cases before the courts, legal opportunity structures approaches locate legal activity in the context of broader political and social debates and focus on bottom-up changes to the law.