SOAS Research Online

Abstract

What determines the stance of the judiciary of a country? Is it the individual characteristics of judges or the understanding of legal norms by judges or the legal and political culture of a country? How much influence do academic writings have in judicial pronouncements? Existing literature shows that there are various determining factors behind judicial decision-making. With the development of legal scholarship on the environment, it is important to see how far judicial decision-making is getting the benefit of that research. It is also important to know how environmental academics and practitioners are viewing the stance taken by the courts in environmental litigations. This research applies socio-legal methods, particularly qualitative research, based on data gathered through semistructured interviews of judges, lawyers, academics, and researchers from India, Bangladesh, and Ireland to understand how they view the roles of the courts in environmental matters and how far the understandings of legal norms and writings of academics are reflected in environmental judicial decision making. Countries both from the east and the west based on constitutional and legal similarities have been selected to compare and contrast and to see if the research result is similar notwithstanding the socio-economic-political differences. This research adopts Thornberg’s informed grounded theory and in addition constant comparative method of data analysis is applied in analysing the collected data. Acknowledging the polycentric and interdisciplinary nature of environmental problems and considering the gaps accrued from collected data this paper provides recommendations to bridge the gaps between academics and practitioners