Validity, Nature, and Future Generations: An Environmental Perspective of Legal Theory (original) (raw)

Conceptual Developments in Environmental Law: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Asian Journal of Education and Social Studies (ISSN: 2581-6268 Journal), núm. 23 (2), pp. 37-47, 2021

This paper's point of view is that environmental law translates this particular evolutionary point in time into principles and rules, and highlights that given the extent and significance of the grave issues we are confronting, concepts that come from other sciences need to be dealt with carefully to ensure these are interpreted and implemented effectively. The grave concern about conservation of the environment and the urgent need for effective measures to protect it is a sign of the times, and it is growing deeper in view of the rapidly worsening climate crisis. Environmental law studies demonstrate that there is a line of force based on fluid, fruitful dialogue between different fields of knowledge. Lawyers are aware of the achievements made in environmental law, as well as its manifest deficiencies and limitations, and, just like Theseus who momentarily loses the golden thread offered by the bold Ariadne, they must find a way out of that labyrinth.

Weaving a Web of Environmental Law

2008

This book is the very first attempt to describe the development of environmental law. In particular, those developments under the auspices of the Environmental Law Programme of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, and within the network of the International Council of Environmental Law and all concerned national and international agencies and organizations.

Perspectives for Environmental Law—Entering the Fourth Phase

Journal of Environmental Law, 1989

Environmental law is the law regulating the relationship of us to nature, understood both as the world around us and AS the nature we carry within ourselves. (Therefore the term 'environment', with its primarily external connotation, is actually an inadequate term.) I would like to distinguish four phases of this relationship between man and his life conditions. These phases might be regarded as an historical series, but they can also all be found among currently existing societies at various stages of development. • Translated by John R. Blazek *• Centre for European Legal Policy, University of Bremen, West Germany 1 E. Schubert in: B. Herrmann (ed), Mtnsch tad Umuxlt im Mitttlalttr, 1986, sa57ff. 1 See examples of guild regulations, but also a discussion of their efficiency and distributive effects in M. Stunner (ed), Herbst dts alia Handwtrts, 1979.

Towards a Critical Environmental Law

This chapter aims to develop further the underlying aim of the anthology 'Law and Ecology', namely the production of what can be called Critical Environmental Law. Situated in this wider ecology of unhomeliness (no all encompassing oikos) and miscommunication (no unifying logos), environmental law finally faces its foundational paradox: that its conceptual limits are both potentially all-inclusive (since every societal problem can be seen as more or less environmental) and devoid of any content (since environmental law can no longer distinguish its ‘object’, namely environment per se). The traditional imaging of the environment as the thing that turns (French virer) around a stable pivot (a distilled sense of pure humanity) has been discredited in view of the collapse of the boundaries between the natural/human/artificial. In order to address this permeability, environmental law has the opportunity and responsibility to construct an adequate theoretical base for its role in environmental protection. The chapter argues for four critical environmental positions that are necessary for environmental law’s attempt at catching up both with other disciplines and the demands made to it by an ever-changing ecology. Thus, first, environmental law must theorise itself as acentric, namely conceive of itself as only one amongst a multiplicity of perspectives, none of which could ever claim to be central (yet all of them claiming precisely that); second, environmental law must de-individualise the individual and position the human in an ecological plane beyond anthropo/ecocentricity; third, environmental law must relinquish the (traditional ecological) ideal of unity and accept uncertainty as a structural and constantly present inevitability rather than an invisibilised externality; and fourth, environmental law must move beyond the illusionary construction of prescriptive idealities and focus on a measured legal description of its own limitations. Largely following a critical reading of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoiesis, and influenced by postecological, feminist, spatial and other radical theoretical writings, the chapter attempts to carve a space of critique simultaneously within and outside environmental law, a mirror of ethical responsibility against which the law can measure its potential, its limits and ultimately its objects of desire. In effect, critical environmental law is an acentric, postecological, manifold and self-aware “thrown-together” of events and spaces which become ‘solid’ and relatively permanent through repetition.

Environmental Principles and the Evolution of Environmental Law, by Eloise Scotford Hart, 2017, 320 pp, £60 hb, ISBN 9781849462976

Transnational Environmental Law, 2017

Scott explores how transnational law developments challenge understandings of what is ' legal ' and give rise to various conceptions of ' law ' , the most conservative of which resembles law ' as we currently know and practice it ' but adapted to actions or events that transcend national boundaries. 8 See ch 1, n 103. 9 See ch 5(II)(C). 10 eg ch 4(V)(B)(ii). Administrative lawyers are also confronted with the increasing use of policy and soft law in governance and (thus) judicial review actions: Robyn Creyke and John McMillan , ' Soft Law v Hard Law ' in Linda Pearson , Carol Harlow and Michael Taggart (eds), Administrative Law in a Changing State (Hart 2008). 11 See ch 3(II).

CONSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE LEGAL-ENVIRONMENTAL RELATIONSHIP

Veredas do Direito, 2021

The environmental impacts on a planetary scale crisis point to a probable collapse of the main indicators of the sustainability of life on the planet. The legal response through Environmental Law has allowed the advance from a set of administrative rules to a legal micro-system with a constitutional foundation. The Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988 elevated the balanced environment to the category of fundamental good, breaking with the individualistic and utilitarian traditions of conventional legal relations on the environment. The understanding of the macro-environmental good prioritizes the fulfillment of fundamental duties by the community, leading to the transformation of several traditional legal institutes, which among the legal relationship. This article reviews the literature and Brazilian legislation employing the deductive method to support the emergence of the fundamental legal-environmental relationship. This is a new kind of legal relation, which presents two distinctive marks: its diffuse nature, and its object, the environmental good, which defines the immaterial condition of the ecological balance, elevated to the condition of a fundamental good by the constitution. This produces the effect of the preponderance of the duty to preserve the environmental good beyond the most conventional fundamental rights of its subjects by imposing limits and objective guidelines for the pursuit of a balanced environment by its intrinsic values.

Environmental Laws and Sustainability: An Introduction

Sustainability, 2011

In this introduction to the special issue of Sustainability on environmental laws and sustainability, we attempt to synthesize key lessons from the issue"s ten substantive articles. These lessons involve the use of law to achieve integrated decision-making, the use of pre-existing laws to foster sustainability, the centrality of sub-national governments in achieving sustainability, the background law of unsustainable development, the growing importance of climate change, the need to use law to protect and restore ecological integrity, the importance of judicial review and nongovernmental organizations, the need to translate sustainability into specific legal principles, the challenge of creating an appropriate national legal structure for sustainability, the importance of sustainability assessment tools and institutions before and after laws are adopted, and the importance of "soft" law.

Environmental Law for the 21st Century

Pace Environmental Law Review, 2023

One of the commenters on a preliminary draft of this article suggested that we have a love-hate relationship with law and economics. Perhaps a better metaphor would be that we are prodigal sons. We both studied under the great Guido Calabresi, one of the founders of Law and Economics. We revere him as a mentor, and we believe that we are applying and extending his work to our field. We both also learned a great deal from professors Bruce A. Ackerman and Susan Rose Ackerman, also our colleagues at Yale, who were among the first to apply law and economics thinking to Environmental Law. 1 Elliott was privileged to co