Evaluating Performative Speech Acts in Judicial Reviews of False Environmental Advertising

• Sunday Sunday

  Ladoke Akintola University of Technology

  Author

False environmental advertising has become a central concern in consumer protection and climate governance, yet judicial assessment of such claims remains theoretically underdeveloped. Courts routinely evaluate whether corporate environmental statements are “misleading,” but they lack a systematic framework for distinguishing between aspirational discourse and binding performative commitments. This study addresses that gap by applying speech act theory to judicial reasoning in greenwashing cases, asking how courts implicitly evaluate the performative force of corporate environmental utterances. Drawing on a qualitative doctrinal analysis of leading judicial decisions—principally the Paris Tribunal’s 2025 ruling in Greenpeace France and Others v. TotalEnergies—supplemented by a structured coding protocol applied across 47 adjudicated claims, the study develops a Performative Judicial Review Framework (PJRF). The framework classifies corporate environmental statements along three dimensions: assertive content, commissive force, and directive address. Key findings indicate that 89.4% of judicial findings of misleading conduct involved statements that combined strong commissive framing (“ambition,” “commitment”) with weak assertive substantiation, while courts consistently rejected the “mere puffery” defense where temporal specificity was present. The study concludes that judicial review of environmental advertising operates as an implicit speech-act evaluation and that explicit theoretical articulation would improve consistency and predictability. Implications extend to regulators, adjudicators, and corporate communicators seeking to align environmental discourse with verifiable conduct.

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