Journal of Law and Political Economy

This article analyzes the impact of climate change litigation on the form of private law, contributing to our understanding of the transformative potential and limits of private law. I argue that climate change litigation breaks the homology between the commodity form and the legal form, to surprisingly antisystemic effect. Developing this argument, I make three distinct contributions. First, I demonstrate that the legal form of climate change litigation is incompatible with the rationale of capital accumulation. Second, I update the commodity form theory of law elaborated by Pašukanis to conceptualize the transformations of European private law systems that have been unfolding for some decades, which I tentatively label “private law for the age of monopoly capitalism” (PLAMC). Third, I contend that climate change litigation departs from the rationale of PLAMC and that in these cases the legal form does not replicate the commodity form. This rare dissociation creates antisystemic potential.