Beware of populist narratives: the importance of getting the Heathrow ruling right

Despite being presented as an act of judicial chutzpah, the Court of Appeal’s ruling against the government’s planned Heathrow expansion is in fact a modest proposal, explains Veerle Heyvaert. Unlike recent cases elsewhere, it did not challenge climate policy as a whole, but instead judicially reviewed the legality of a single project. She writes that failure to represent the judgment accurately could feed into the populist narrative of courts subverting the ‘will of the people’ yet again.