This article examines how legal processes shape the pursuit of just energy transitions, highlighting the judiciary's role in balancing climate goals, Indigenous rights, and environmental justice. While court cases can play a crucial role in enabling Indigenous peoples to assert their rights, the outcomes hinge on the judiciary's ability to understand the cultural and relational significance of Saami reindeer herding. Using courtroom ethnography, I observed the Øyfjellet wind power court case in the Saami reindeer herding district of Jillen Njaarke Sïjte . The article explores how Norwegian courts interpret and adjudicate culturally embedded claims to land and sustainability. Through a structural narrative analysis, the article identifies three interconnected narratives of temporal-hermeneutical injustice: establishing interpretive power through procedural exclusions, flattening relational Saami knowledge into administrative evidence, and marginalizing the ecological entanglements of land and herding routes. The analysis demonstrates how linear legal chronologies render Saami relationality legally unintelligible, perpetuating epistemic hierarchies. True justice requires reorienting collective interpretive resources to validate autonomous Indigenous temporalities, cosmologies, and onto-epistemologies, not as colonial contrasts but as sovereign frameworks. By positioning time as a structural site of power and resistance, this study advances scholarship on temporal-hermeneutical justice and energy transitions.
Henrikke Sæthre Ellingsen (Mon,) studied this question.