This chapter addresses the concept of ’receivability’ of complaints to international administrative tribunals, encompassing requirements of both jurisdiction and admissibility. The analysis distinguishes between jurisdiction ratione personae (who can bring claims) and ratione materiae (subject matter), as well as procedural issues like exhaustion of remedies and time limits. By comparing statutory provisions and case law, the chapter identifies common practices across IATs, such as conditions under which non-staff personnel or former staff members may have standing. The chapter underscores how similar approaches have evolved among IATs despite varying statutory constraints.

This chapter explores the growing prevalence of non-staff personnel within the UN system and the legal challenges they face in accessing justice. As non-staff personnel increasingly take on roles traditionally held by staff, they remain largely excluded from the jurisdiction of IATs and often may only avail themselves of arbitration clauses that can be prohibitive in practice. The chapter examines potential legal implications of this situation, such as functional immunity before domestic courts, as well as proposed solutions, such as alternative dispute mechanisms and expedited arbitration. It reviews current UN pilot projects aimed at providing non-staff personnel with informal dispute resolution avenues and discusses potential reforms to bridge the access-to-justice gap.

This chapter canvasses more than 400 decisions across some twenty IATs where references to international human rights instruments have appeared. Interestingly, it emerges that the vast majority of cases in which such instruments are cited concern three substantive areas: non-discrimination, due process rights and economic rights. The chapter therefore focusses on these three areas. It then reviews citations to human rights instruments in a variety of other substantive areas, including privacy rights, expression related rights, the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of nationality, and the right to just and favourable conditions of work. The chapter concludes that while IATs now regularly refer to international human rights instruments, their treatment of this body of law is inconsistent, ranging from some judgments refusing to acknowledge its direct applicability at all to other judgments considering it hierarchically superior to other sources of law.

Chapter 2 explores the constitutive elements of global environmental governance. International environmental governance works when states fulfill the commitments they undertake under international law, such as the obligation to exchange information on transboundary environmental risks and impacts and the duty to notify and consult with other states with regard to such risks and impacts. Mechanisms of global environmental governance include also environmental impact assessments and strategic impact assessments. The chapter examines, furthermore, how the monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) of compliance with international environmental obligations has been modernized by the wide application of technologies. It explores whether green democracy has become a universal aspirational principle, and how the system for the protection of human rights has been used as a tool for the protection of the environment, lending support to the emergence of a right to a healthy environment. Whether nature, as a legal entity, should be accorded rights and have a say on the development plans of states is also analyzed.

Lauren van Schilfgaarde (UCLA Law) explains that many Tribal codes allow lay advocates to appear before Tribal courts without requiring them to be state bar members or have attended an ABA-accredited law school. Tribal courts, being extra-constitutional, are not bound by US constitutional requirements, including guarantees for adequate legal representation. Tribes have built justice systems based on Tribal customs, traditions, and community needs. These systems often require cultural competence not provided in American legal education, leading Tribes to develop their own lay advocacy requirements, which are enshrined in Tribal codes that set forth comprehensive requirements and ethical frameworks governing lay advocate practices. The examination of these Tribal codes reveals how lay advocates are an integral part of many Tribes’ justice systems.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth (Vanderbilt Law) argues that the legal services regulatory scheme perversely both over- and under-regulates the legal services marketplace – licensing too few lawyers on the front end and then, on the back end, taking insufficient steps to ensure adequate quality. According to Allensworth, the current system of lawyer regulation bars nonlawyer providers from the system and simultaneously shunts the lowest-quality lawyers into the system’s lower precincts, where the consequences of poor representation are most sharply felt. Allensworth’s lightning bolt of a chapter shows that the challenge of regulatory reform is not just opening the system to new providers but also rethinking how to allocate – and police – the providers already there.

David Freeman Engstrom (Stanford) and Daniel B. Rodriguez (Northwestern) argue that current structure of American legal services regulation, known as “Our Bar Federalism,” is outdated. Fifty states maintain their own rules and regulatory apparatus for a legal profession and industry that are now national and multinational. This fragmented system is a key factor in the American civil justice system’s access-to-justice crisis, where restrictive state rules support the lawyers’ monopoly. With new legal services delivery models and AI, this scheme will seem increasingly provincial and retrograde. This chapter argues it’s time to rethink "Our Bar Federalism," and explore hybrid state-federal regulatory system.

David Engstrom and Jess Lu (both Stanford Law) first show that an otherwise fast-growing and dynamic “legal tech” industry has not generated significant “direct-to-consumer” technologies designed to help self-represented litigants navigate a complex legal system. They then interrogate that puzzle: Why is it that better consumer legal tech hasn’t flourished? They ultimately settle on the idea that rule reforms alone may not stimulate high-scale, direct-to-consumer technology. Instead, other policy interventions may be necessary, including standardizing what is currently a checkerboard of court technology and data infrastructures. Perhaps more importantly, direct-to-consumer legal tech may have trouble overcoming some of the problems that are inherent to markets that are attempting to serve individuals with episodic attachment to the civil justice system and limited ability to pay. The result is an important meditation on whether reforms to UPL, Rule 5.4, or something else entirely are necessary to unlock the potential of potent new technologies in order to narrow the justice gap.

Rebecca Sandefur (Arizona State) and Mathew Burnett (American Bar Foundation) – one a MacArthur Genius Award-winning sociologist, the other a longtime leader on access-to-justice issues – explore ways to reform legal services regulation, from relaxing UPL rules (to welcome new providers into the system) to relaxing Rule 5.4’s bar on nonlawyer ownership of law firms (to make available new sources of capital investment). After reviewing existing empirical evidence, they argue in favor of the former, in order to spur new human-centered service models, as against longer-term and less proven reforms altering law firm ownership.

Judge Carolyn Kuhl (L.A. Superior Court), until recently the chief judge of the nation’s largest trial court system, offers an important contribution to the debate about whether and how to relax “courthouse UPL” – the possibility that judges, court clerks, other court staff, and AI-enabled chatbots might plausibly narrow the justice gap by providing self-represented litigants with necessary assistance. At once a history lesson and an in-the-trenches look at a decade of L.A. court reforms, Judge Kuhl shows how the anxieties about judicial and court neutrality have given way to a rich array of reform options that are producing concrete lessons for other judicial reformers looking for alternatives to conventional forms of legal help.

Rebecca Aviel (Denver University (Sturm) Law) draws on her deep expertise in family law to illuminate ways in which domestic relations cases are exceptional relative to other legal areas where access concerns are acute. Family law’s exceptionalism, she contends, justifies thoroughgoing changes to that system’s adversarial architecture, such as permitting a single lawyer to represent both sides in a divorce, that are well-tailored to family law even if nonstarters in other parts of the civil justice system. Aviel also suggests that some innovative family law programs might travel well, informing reforms in other civil justice contexts even where they cannot be directly replicated.

Allison Hoffman (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law), an expert on health care regulation, focuses on tectonic changes to health care in recent decades. She offers a bracing account of these shifts, arguing that American doctors may have overreached in their efforts at influencing health care regulation. In so doing, physicians created profit pools that corporate interests proved all too adept at capturing, leaving doctors with lower professional status than they might have otherwise enjoyed. Hoffman suggests that lawyers, and legal reformers more generally, might learn from physicians’ cautionary tale of protectionism and profit.

There is growing global interest in how AI can improve access to justice, including how it can increase court capacity. This chapter considers the potential future use of AI to resolve disputes in the place of the judiciary. We focus our analysis on the right to a fair trial as outlined in Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and ask: do we have a right to a human judge? We firstly identify several challenges to interpreting and applying Article 6 in this new context, before considering the principle of human dignity, which has received little attention to date. Arguing that human dignity is an interpretative principle which incorporates protection from dehumanisation, we propose it provides a deeper, or “thicker” reading of Article 6. Applied to this context, we identify risks of dehumanisation posed by judicial AI, including not being heard, or not being subject to human judgement or empathy. We conclude that a thicker reading of Article 6 informed by human dignity strongly suggests the need to preserve human judges at the core of the judicial process in the age of AI.

Chapter 5 on Admissibility delves into the factors determining whether a climate case can be heard in court. It presents a clear understanding of the criteria for admissibility and their potential implications on the trajectory of climate litigation. The chapter also delves into the interplay between domestic and international legal rules and norms and their influence on the criteria for admissibility. The author’s analysis reveals that a restrictive interpretation of admissibility criteria can present formidable access to justice barriers, particularly for those most impacted by climate change. In light of these challenges, the author’s distillation of emerging best practice highlights instances where courts and quasi-judicial bodies have interpreted admissibility criteria to ensure access to justice. Specifically, the chapter highlights cases where these bodies have considered human rights and justice imperatives in their admissibility decisions. These decisions highlight the potential for an inclusive and equitable approach to climate litigation, one that aligns with the global nature of the climate crisis and the urgent need for climate justice.

Chapter 14 on Intergenerational Equity sheds light on how this principle, which posits a responsibility to ensure that future generations inherit a habitable planet, has been invoked in climate cases to date. The authors examine how this principle has been interpreted and applied across different jurisdictions, highlighting the notable contributions of jurisprudence from the Global South in shaping the development and understanding of the principle. Through an examination of leading cases from around the world, they illuminate how courts in these jurisdictions have infused their decisions with a consideration for future generations, thereby advancing a more inclusive and long-term perspective on climate justice. The authors distil instances of emerging best practice where the principle of intergenerational equity has been invoked to guide legal reasoning and judicial decisions in climate cases. They underscore the potential of this principle to shape future climate litigation, particularly as the impacts of climate change increasingly span across generations.

Chapter 4 explores the intricacies of the legal principle of standing, its role in climate litigation, and how it impacts the ability of parties to bring climate change-related lawsuits to trial. The author discusses interpretations of standing across different jurisdictions, such as the United States, New Zealand, and countries in Europe, and explains how these interpretations can either impede or facilitate climate litigation. He distils emerging best practice from this analysis, providing an insightful guide for future climate lawsuits. The author then identifies emerging best practice in interpreting standing rules in a flexible manner, thus allowing a broader range of actors to bring climate-related lawsuits and enhancing access to justice.