This paper poses an important challenge to the growing trend of strategic environmental litigation in the EU: when making strategic choices about bringing, framing, and litigating claims, what becomes more important—being heard through strategically critical procedural choices or being true through ensuring that rights holders and the environment remain at the forefront of decision-making? There are many legal hurdles to bringing environmental claims and it is possible that the voice of the environment and those most adversely affected by its degradation is lost in the strategic legal decision-making. This study uses a small number unstructured scoping interviews with practitioners active in bringing litigation to the CJEU to inductively analyse voice and representation in strategic environmental litigation. This initial research indicates that there are areas which should be further explored. First, all of the practitioners brought up the issue of access to resources. This raises concerns about potential elitism. Second, practitioners highlighted that there are numerous strategic choices made during case selection and framing which could affect how voices are heard. Finally, practitioners felt strongly that admissibility rules have a negative impact on claimants’ voices. Challenges in legal standing and establishing individual harm or direct concern have an enormous impact on what claims are heard and how they are heard.

The removal of controversial names and monuments from the public sphere in the United States has gained traction in the context of efforts to achieve social justice for historically mistreated and marginalized communities. Such debates are increasingly raising issues in the healthcare setting as hospitals and medical schools grapple with the legacies of figures whose scientific contributions are clouded with ethical transgressions. Present efforts to address these challenges have largely occurred at the institutional level. The results have been guidelines that are complex, highly inconsistent across institutions, and largely downplay the symbolic importance of such historical redress. This paper proposes a simpler three-part test for name and monument removal in the medical and hospital settings that places greater weight on the symbolic importance of the renaming process itself instead of only considering the outcomes.