Lobbying the Courts workshop
On 14 and 15 September, the 'Lobbying the Courts' workshop took place in Paris. This was an interdisciplinary workshop in which researchers from different disciplines came together to brainstorm on whether, how, and when interest groups focus on the judicial process and the courts in their lobbying strategies.
From Leiden University, Rowie Stolk, PhD student at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law and affiliated with ELS, presented a paper she co-authored with Caelesta Braun, Professor of Public Governance and Civil Society, on litigation as a collective action strategy.
In their paper: 'Litigation as Collective Action Strategy: A political-legal perspective on public interest litigation', Caelesta and Rowie combine their social science and legal knowledge on interest groups that use litigation to push for political, social, or legal change. Using a Dutch case study, they show that public interest litigation is not an isolated legal phenomenon, but that litigation is part of an integrated approach. In their paper, Caelesta and Rowie discuss various factors that may influence the choice of interest organisations to litigate or not, such as procedural possibilities and constraints, organisational structure of the interest organisation and other lobbying strategies used.
The workshop organised by HEC Paris sought, among other things, to define the little-studied phenomenon of 'lobbying the courts'. It became clear that interdisciplinary and cross-border cooperation is important to get a better grip on the ways in which interest organisations try to influence public policy through the law and the judicial process.