Alumnus and lawyer Roger Cox uses the law to enforce climate policy
Limburg lawyer Roger Cox has caused a legal revolution. With high-profile cases against the Dutch state and Shell oil company, he transformed the law into a tool to enforce climate policy. Leidraad alumni magazine spoke to him about a life defined by radical choices for a better world.
Not a single interview goes by without him being asked where his passion comes from. Then lawyer Roger Cox, famous from the successful Urgenda case against the Dutch state and the case against Shell (the court of appeal will hand down its judgment this autumn) talks about his childhood in Voerendaal in the province of Limburg. He only had to walk a few metres to find himself in nature, watching birds of prey.
And the petition he started as an eight-year-old against the clubbing of seal pups invariably comes up too. Cox grew up in, as he puts it, a loving and principled family: ‘Civically engaged but too modest to be activists. This was limited to mottos like “don’t drop litter” and “say hello to people in the street”.’
Enormous impact
His father first developed the symptoms of epilepsy when Roger was four, and a brain tumour was soon found to be the cause. ‘He lived a further ten years, but his illness had an enormous impact on our family and on my development.’ The situation made him insecure and lacking in resilience. He was never a loner though. His parents signed him up for judo, which boosted his self-confidence, and a dog was welcomed into the family, which took him outdoors even more often. Cox looks back at a childhood full of nature, books and friends.
Father’s death
Until the second year of secondary school, Roger was convinced he wanted to be a biologist. ‘My father’s death threw a spanner in the works. Losing him was incredibly hard, not just at important moments but also at times when I needed a father figure, to ask questions about faith, life and death. My motivation for school waned and by the time I had to choose subjects for upper secondary school, the sciences proved too much of a challenge.’
Cox did not have a burning passion after secondary school and military service, so he looked instead for a broad degree programme and ended up choosing political science in Leiden. ‘My girlfriend at the time’s brother was studying there and from his stories the city sounded to be compact and friendly with a vibrant student life. That sounded appealing. During EL CID week I met former schoolmates who had set their sights on Minerva, and at the end of the week I joined too. It was all a bit organic. What I saw there seemed like a challenging game and I also had the prospect of a nice Minerva house on Herengracht. I later moved to Rapenburg. I had a good time at university.’
Pallet factory
He was not quite prepared for the costs of Minerva life. ‘I had no funds to fall back on from home and had to take on all sorts of jobs. I was a tutor and a night porter. And I spent six weeks working on the conveyor belt at Steijn pallet factory in Voorschoten when I temporarily suspended from Minerva because my bar bill was too high.’
‘As a student I was too busy surviving to care about the suffering of the world’
Studying came easily to him. ‘I passed my first year in Political Science more or less in my sleep and noticed that lots of friends who were doing law had more difficulty with that. I thought that sounded more exciting and that impression was reinforced when I studied Nieuwenhuis’s Hoofdstukken vermogensrecht (Chapters on Property Law). The case studies particularly intrigued me, the craftsmanship and applicability.’ Cox enrolled in the law programme as well.
He had little money for textbooks but there were lots of law students in his student house. ‘I could borrow almost everything and if there were new editions I had to find the changed pages somewhere and make copies of them.’
‘Looking back, I didn’t have a particularly intensive social life at university’, he adds. ‘I did a lot of independent study, relaxed at Minerva and worked.’
His above-average results soon parachuted him into the ‘more than 8 club’ and he was put in a special class on law and development aid. ‘That did not interest me in the least at that time. I was hot on mergers and acquisitions, for example. As I see it now, I was too busy surviving to care about the suffering of the world. That came much later, just like my interest in the climate crisis.’
Roger’s love of nature was still alive and kicking though and during his studies he travelled to Alaska in 1992 to see one of the last great wildernesses. ‘When I look at my photos of then and compare it with the loss of Alaskan glaciers now, I well up. It is heartbreaking to see how climate change is forcing indigenous people to leave their cultural territories after thousands of years.’
This article is in the October edition of Leidraad alumni magazine. Read the full article in the magazine (in Dutch).
Text: Fred Hermsen
Photo: Frank Ruiter