Focusing on contemporary debates in philosophy and legal theory, this ground-breaking book provides a compelling enquiry into the nature of human dignity. The author not only illustrates that dignity is a concept that can extend our understanding of our environmental impacts and duties, but also highlights how our reliance on and relatedness to the environment further extends and enhances our understanding of dignity itself.

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.

Despite the global endorsement of the Sustainable Development Goals, environmental justice struggles are growing all over the world. These struggles are not isolated injustices, but symptoms of interlocking forms of oppression that privilege the few while inflicting misery on the many and threatening ecological collapse. This handbook offers critical perspectives on the multi-dimensional, intersectional nature of environmental injustice and the cross-cutting forms of oppression that unite and divide these struggles, including gender, race, poverty, and indigeneity. The work sheds new light on the often-neglected social dimension of sustainability and its relationship to human rights and environmental justice. Using a variety of legal frameworks and case studies from around the world, this volume illustrates the importance of overcoming the fragmentation of these legal frameworks and social movements in order to develop holistic solutions that promote justice and protect the planet's ecosystems at a time of intensifying economic and ecological crisis.

This thought-provoking introduction provides an incisive overview of dignity law, a field of law emerging in every region of the globe that touches all significant aspects of the human experience. Through an examination of the burgeoning case law in this area, James R. May and Erin Daly reveal a strong overlapping consensus surrounding the meaning of human dignity as a legal right and a fundamental value of nations large and small, and how this global jurisprudence is redefining the relationship between individuals and the state.

This book is dedicated to a topic which has for a long time lacked the attention it deserves within the academic world. It intends to address in a coherent and comprehensive manner the problem of the environmental rights of the child, which are not identical to the ones of adults whose environmental rights have been appraised from a general point of view. In the absence of any international law instrument explicitly granting a child the right to a clean environment, drawing on an extensive and original analysis of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the practice of its monitoring body, this book undertakes an assessment of the extent to which these challenges may be overcome through a greater engagement between international law on the rights of the child and international environmental law. The result is the first comprehensive study on the manner in which these two mutually reinforcing legal regimes can interact to strengthen the protection of children’s environmental human rights at stake in the increased strategic environmental and climate litigations at both the national and international level. The book is recommended reading for, amongst others, policy makers, international environmental lawyers and human rights lawyers and practitioners. Additionally, lecturers, students and researchers from a range of disciplines will also gain from seeing how new legal scholarship and intertwined branches of international law contribute to the continual development of the living rights of the human rights conventions. Francesca Ippolito is Associate Professor of International Law in the Department of Political and Social Science of the University of Cagliari, Italy. She holds the Jean Monnet Chair on European Climate of Change - REACT for 2021-2024.

Originally published in 2012, Dignity Rights is the first book to explore the constitutional law of dignity around the world. In it, Erin Daly shows how dignity has come not only to define specific interests like the right to humane treatment or to earn a living wage, but also to protect the basic rights of a person to control his or her own life and to live in society with others. Daly argues that, through the right to dignity, courts are redefining what it means to be human in the modern world. As described by the courts, the scope of dignity rights marks the outer boundaries of state power, limiting state authority to meet the demands of human dignity. As a result, these cases force us to reexamine the relationship between the individual and the state and, in turn, contribute to a new and richer understanding of the role of the citizen in modern democracies. This updated edition features a new preface by the author, in which she articulates how, over the past decade, dignity rights cases have evolved to incorporate the convergence of human rights and environmental rights that we have seen at the international level and in domestic constitutions.

In Transformative Environmental Constitutionalism, Professor Melanie Jean Murcott writes from a Global South perspective, drawing on South African context to provide a transformative theoretical framework for adjudication of environmental law disputes which could be more responsive to social, environmental, and climate injustices.

A comprehensive and systematic guide to environmental rights and their relationship with standards of protection globally, nationally and locally.

Environmental rights are a category of human rights necessarily central to both democracy and effective earth system governance (any environmental-ecological-sustainable democracy). For any democracy to remain democratic, some aspects must be beyond democracy and must not be allowed to be subjected to any ordinary democratic collective choice processes shy of consensus. Real, established rights constitute a necessary boundary of legitimate everyday democratic practice. We analyze how human rights are made democratically and, in particular, how they can be made with respect to matters environmental, especially matters that have import beyond the confines of the modern nation state.

"This book takes a fresh look at the place of the Human Rights Act in Britain's constitutional order.