Meet the new team at the 'Strategic Climate Litigation' research project
25 September 2024
Clara Kammeringer, PhD Researcher
Clara has joined the project to focus on the aspects of representation and participation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Maastricht, where she focused on law and philosophy. Afterwards, she worked as a research assistant at the Vienna Forum for Democracy and Human Rights and did a traineeship at the Court of Justice of the European Union. In summer 2024, she completed her LL.M. in Legal Theory from the European Academy of Legal Theory at Goethe University Frankfurt.
With her interdisciplinary background, Clara aims to equip democracies with tools that make them more resilient and enable us to address major crises, such as the effects of climate change. In pursuing an academic career, she hopes to inform legal and democratic development to future-proof how we govern ourselves.
Renske Natté, PhD researcher
Renske will focus on the impact of climate litigation on democracy, through the role of climate science in court. She graduated from the master’s International Business Law and Climate Change, where she specialized in the impact of international business law on climate change and vice versa.
Before her master’s, Renske completed a bachelor’s degree in law and a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and sciences at University College Utrecht. Here, she specialized in international relations, mathematics and legal philosophy. After completing several internships both in journalism and in law firms, Renske decided to pursue her academic aspirations.
Alberto Nicòtina, Postdoctoral Researcher
Alberto has joined the project and is also a Lecturer in EU Law. In May 2024, he defended his PhD thesis at the University of Antwerp (titled: “Constitutional Strategies in the face of Multi-level Governance: an Empirical Legal Theory of EU Integration”. His research interests include comparative constitutional law, especially within the EU, environmental law, legal theory, and qualitative legal methods.
Over the past few years, Alberto has been a Trainee at the Court of Justice of the European Union, in the cabinet of the Estonian judge Küllike Jürimäe (2024), and a Visiting Researcher at several European universities including Copenhagen and Madrid Complutense. After obtaining his 5-year Laurea Magistrale in Comparative, European, and Transnational Law from the University of Trento, Italy (2018), he worked at a large Milan-based international law firm, where his practice focused on environmental law issues.
Simon Waswa, PhD researcher
Simon studied for his Bachelor of Laws at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and it was here that he developed a passion for Environmental Law.
After completing his LL.B., he studied for the Bar and obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Legal practice. After working as a lawyer in private legal practice, he enrolled for a Masters in Environmental Law at Stockholm University in 2023. During his LL.M., he developed a particular bias for climate and biodiversity law. He is interested in understanding how litigation can be employed strategically to resolve environmental challenges as exemplified by the current triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution as well as ensuring accountability.