Conference Programme

Climate litigation against corporations is on the rise, yet research on firms’ responses yields mixed findings. We argue that different types of litigation remedial requests trigger distinctive institutional logics as interpretive cultural toolkit and thus explain this inconsistency. When firms see their jurisdictional peers facing injunctive relief litigation, they activate a climate logic to interpret the legal action, perceive sustained pressures, and thus reduce their emissions. In contrast, when they see their peers facing monetary relief litigation, firms activate a financial logic: they perceive the legal action as financially motivated and see an opportunity to “buy out” the pressure, ultimately increasing their emissions. When peers face mixed relief litigation, firms experience institutional ambiguity and struggle to activate an interpretive system that combines competing logics, resulting in inaction. Using a 2010–2023 dataset linking U.S. climate litigation to facility emissions, a contiguous border discontinuity design, and complementary interviews with legal experts, we provide causal evidence for these arguments. We address concerns on whether there are genuine emissions responses (e.g., pollution outsourcing or reduction), whether it is driven by logic activation or cancelling out of multiple logics, and whether legal threat intensity or corporate-level factors drives both litigation types and emissions responses.