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Over a decade ago I was involved in a group project that focused on developing a regulatory model concerning the implementation of the precautionary principle in the EU. The project involved a number of workshops and in those workshops I used to joke about the fact that while there were many different frameworks being produced to represent risk regulation, these diagrams basically fell into two different categories. In the first category there were those diagrams that characterised risk regulation as a linear process involving usually a scientific process of risk assessment and then political processes of risk management and risk communication. In the second category there were those diagrams that had lots of looping arrows going all over the place that represented the fact that risk regulation was an iterative process that constantly involved many scientific, socio-political and other inputs.Behind my joking was a sense of hope. The linear diagrams did have their minimalist appeal, but the messy diagrams captured much of the reality of this area of regulatory practice.

Climate change litigation is an obsessive preoccupation for many legal scholars. Three different "narratives" can be identified for why scholars find such litigation important to study: litigation is a response to institutional failure, legal reasoning holds authority, and litigation is a forum for the co‐production of facts and social orders. The nature and consequences of these narratives are considered in the context of the firstU.S. Supreme Court "climate change" case—Massachusetts v.EPA(2007). This analysis has implications for both how scholars understand their expertise in this area, and how they should foster it.