While civil society and social movements claim for more effective measures to cope with anthropogenic climate change, legal scholars are witnessing the “aurora” of climate change law. What is quite relevant in this double-process of recognition/establishment is the interdisciplinary nature of such a field of studies, which goes beyond formalistic legal aspects. Based on the need to rethink legal paradigms, “Climate Constitutionalism Momentum: Adaptive Legal Systems” deals with three major means to combat anthropogenic climate change—namely science, politics and law—further addressing the thesis regarding a supposed adaptiveness of legal systems and proposing new pathways for further inquiries on the current climate constitutionalism momentum. The book introduces the international efforts in acknowledging the need for concrete measures to achieve ambitious results, addressing the comparative public law debate, merging theoretical appraisals and quantitative insights under a top-down approach and a civil-law methodology. Furthermore, the book combines theoretical and empirical viewpoints in reference to climate justice and litigation. The last part of the argumentative pattern merges the aforementioned key elements and grounds of investigation, providing an overall account of the current climate constitutionalism momentum. Academic researchers are the book’s primary audience, but it is also targeted for undergraduate and postgraduate students of specific courses. For the numerous insights and the contemporary relevance of the topic, the book is also addressed to political stakeholders and legal practitioners. Given the transnational development of this area of law, the expected audience of the book is global.

Presents comprehensively the currently un-mapped constellation of issues related to climate change, public health, and the law.

Reflecting a global trend, scores of countries have affirmed that their citizens are entitled to healthy air, water, and land and that their constitution should guarantee certain environmental rights. This book examines the increasing recognition that the environment is a proper subject for protection in constitutional texts and for vindication by constitutional courts. This phenomenon, which the authors call environmental constitutionalism, represents the confluence of constitutional law, international law, human rights, and environmental law. National apex and constitutional courts are exhibiting a growing interest in environmental rights, and as courts become more aware of what their peers are doing, this momentum is likely to increase. This book explains why such provisions came into being, how they are expressed, and the extent to which they have been, and might be, enforced judicially. It is a singular resource for evaluating the content of and hope for constitutional environmental rights.

This book examines the relationship between man and nature through different cultural approaches to encourage new environmental legislation as a means of fostering acceptance at a local level. In 2019, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) recognised that we have entered a new era, the Anthropocene, specifically characterised by the impact of one species, mankind, on environmental change. The Anthropocene is penetrating the discourse of both hard sciences and humanities and social sciences, by posing new epistemological as well as practical challenges to many disciplines. Legal sciences have so far been at the margins of this intellectual renewal, with few contributions on the central role that the notion of Anthropocene could play in forging a more effective and just environmental law. By applying a multidisciplinary approach and adopting a Law as Culture paradigm to the study of law, this book explores new paths of investigation and possible solutions to be applied. New perspectives for the constitutional framing of environmental policies, rights, and alternative methods for bottom-up participatory law-making and conflict resolution are investigated, showing that environmental justice is not just an option, but an objective within reach. The book will be essential reading for students, academics, and policymakers in the areas of law, environmental studies and anthropology.

This book examines the greening of civil codes from a comparative perspective. It takes into account the increasing requirements of supranational rules, which favour measures to reduce global warming and its negative environmental impacts; it discusses the necessity to expand distributive justice given the current ecological emergency; and it reflects on which private law legal tools potentially may be employed to defend nature’s interests. The work fills a gap in the growing literature on developing rights of nature and ecosystem in transnational law. While the focus is on the environmental issues pertaining to the new civil codes and new projects of civil codes, the book promotes interdisciplinary research applicable to a range of environmental and natural resources–focused courses across the social sciences, especially those related to comparative law systems, legal anthropology, legal traditions in the world, political science and international relations.

Constitutions can play a central role in responding to environmental challenges, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, lack of drinking water, and climate change. The vast majority of people on earth live under constitutional systems that protect the environment or recognize environmental rights. Such environmental constitutionalism, however, falls short without effective implementation by policymakers, advocates and jurists. Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism: Current Global Challenges explains and explores this 'implementation gap'. This collection is both broad and deep. While some of the essays analyze crosscutting themes, such as climate change and the need for rule of law that affect the implementation of environmental constitutionalism throughout the world, others delve deeply into geographically contextual experiences for lessons about how constitutional environmental law might be more effectively implemented. This volume informs global conversations about whether and how environmental constitutionalism can be made more effective to protect the natural environment.

The book provides a comprehensive analysis of local government in federations. It fills the gap in current legal research and positions local government in federal studies through the lenses of comparative law, adopting a more nuanced approach to local government. The book considers the shortcomings between the black-letter constitution and its operational rules. Whether (and how) the regime of local government is implemented is more relevant than its formal-but-ineffective recognition. The comparative survey discloses the variety local institutions take in different federal contexts. Divided into three parts, the book comprises chapters investigating local government in systems that, to various degrees, have been examined and classified as federal. Scholars throughout the world have examined the federal-local connection in aggregative federations, (the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Austria), devolutionary ones (Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Italy, Spain, the UK, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the Russian Federation), as well as in federations beyond the West, where federalism-as-a-colonial-legacy has undergone a process of reinvention affecting the federal-local connection (South Africa, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia; St. Kitts and Nevis; United Arab Emirates; and Pakistan).

Aoife O'Donoghue explains why normative constitutionalism must underpin the global constitutionalisation debate if it is to realise its critical potential.

Global climate constitutionalism is seen as a possible legal answer to the social and political unwillingness of states to effectively tackle climate change as a global problem. The constitutionalisation of international climate law is supposed to ensure greater participation of non-state actors such as NGOs or individuals and a rollback of state sovereignty where states do not care about meeting their climate commitments. This book addresses the question of whether non-state actors such as NGOs or individuals create international climate law through so-called climate change litigation. Against the background of Peter Häberle's theory of the “open society of constitutional interpreters”, four selected cases (Urgenda v Netherlands, Leghari v Pakistan, Juliana v United States of America, Future Generations v Colombia) are used to examine how actors not formally recognized as subjects of international law (re)interpret national and international law and thereby contribute to the constitutionalisation of the international climate law regime.