This book systematically explores the emerging legal discipline of Earth System Law (ESL), challenging the closed system of law and marking a new era in law and society scholarship. Law has historically provided stability, certainty, and predictability in the ordering of social relations (predominantly between humans). However, in recent decades the Earth’s relationship in law has changed with increasing recognition of the standing of Mother Earth, inherent rights of the environment (such as flora and fauna, rivers), and now recognition of the multiple relations of the Anthropocene. This book questions the fundamental assumption that ‘the law’ only applies to humans, and that the earth, as a system, has intrinsic rights and responsibilities. In the last ten years the planet has experienced its hottest period since human evolution, and by the year 2100, unless substantive action is taken, many species will be lost, and planetary conditions will be intolerable for human civilisation as it currently exists. Relationships between humans, the biosphere, and all planetary systems must change. The authors address these challenging topics, setting the groundwork of ESL to ensure sustainable development of the coupled socio-ecological system that the Earth has become. Earth System Law is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research project, and, as such, this book will be of great interest to researchers and stakeholders from a wide range of disciplines, including political science, anthropology, economics, law, ethics, sociology, and psychology.

This masterful work brings together the crème de la crème of EU law academics and practitioners in celebration of Eleanor Sharpston, KC. As one of the foremost Advocates General serving the Court of Justice, her opinions shaped various aspects of EU procedural and substantive law. Many of them have quickly become classics (Zambrano, Sturgeon, Miles, Bougnaoui, and Farell II) and they do and will continue to shape EU law now and for decades to come. Her contribution and legacy is expertly assessed over 6 parts spanning: her career; EU constitutional law; fundamental rights and citizenship; litigation; internal market; and external relations. This is a worthy commentary on a truly remarkable legal legacy.

The Routledge Handbook of Law and the Anthropocene provides a critical survey into the function of law and governance during a time when humans have the power to impact the Earth system. The Anthropocene is a “crisis of the earth system.” This book addresses its implications for law and legal thinking in the twenty-first century. Unpacking the challenges of the Anthropocene for advocates of ecological law and politics, this handbook pursues a range of approaches to the scientific fact of anthropocentrism, with contributions from lawyers, philosophers, geographers, and environmental and political scientists. Rather than adopting a hubristic normativity, the contributors engage methods, concepts, and legal instruments in a way that underscores the importance of humility and an expansive ethical worldview. Contributors to this volume are leading scholars and future leaders in the field. Rather than upholding orthodoxy, the handbook also problematizes received wisdom and is grounded in the conviction that the ideas we have inherited from the Holocene must all be open to question. Engaging such issues as the Capitalocene, Gaia theory, the rights of nature, posthumanism, the commons, geoengineering, and civil disobedience, this handbook will be of enormous interest to academics, students, and others with interests in ecological law and the current environmental crisis.

This book is the outcome of an interdisciplinary research process aimed at capturing the complexity of the social mobilisation for climate change. It brings together various academic perspectives to understand the diverse forms of climate activism, challenging traditional notions of agency, space, justice, and legality. The reader will broaden their understanding of the social mobilisation for climate change and its interactions with new digital spaces. This book questions public authorities and big greenhouse gas emitters, individual and generational behaviors, artistic creations, territorial identities, legal systems, and even the idea of democracy. This broad overview results from a collection of concise contributions from scholars with different backgrounds, who employ a variety of tools and methodologies in their analysis, although delivering their findings in an accessible language. It is intended for students, scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the areas of Climate Change, Digital Activism, Cultural and Legal Geography, Social and Spatial Justice, Human Rights and Environmental Law, Sustainable Cities, and Just Transition.

This book presents a series of "ecological law" case studies, designed to illustrate in concrete, real-world ways how ecological law would transform law in a range of diverse contexts. Ecological law is an emerging, and currently mostly theoretical, discipline grounded in the need to shift away from anthropocentric legal systems, which aim to promote economic growth using strong protections of private property regimes and state sovereignty, to ecological approaches, which emphasize ecocentrism, the primacy of ecological limits, and intragenerational, intergenerational, and interspecies fairness and justice. The ecological law case studies presented in this book apply the theoretical principles and concepts of ecological law to diverse real-world situations or activities in several countries and contexts. Taking up a range of examples from Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Nigeria, the United States, and internationally, the book demonstrates the concrete relevance of ecological law to contemporary sustainability challenges, as it reveals pathways for overcoming real-world challenges in the implementation and public acceptance of ecological law. This book will appeal to researchers, scholars, and policy makers working in the area of environmental law and governance, as well as others with relevant interests in sociolegal studies, human geography, political science, and environmental studies.

This handbook explores, contextualises and critiques the relationship between anthropocentrism – the idea that human beings are socially and politically at the centre of the cosmos – and international law. While the critical study of anthropocentrism has been under way for several years, it has either focused on specific subfields of international law or emanated from two distinctive strands inspired by the animal rights movement and deep ecology. This handbook offers a broader study of anthropocentrism in international law as a global legal system and academic field. It assesses the extent to which current international law is anthropocentric, contextualises that claim in relation to broader critical theories of anthropocentrism, and explores alternative ways for international law to organise relations between humans and other living and non-living entities. This book will interest international lawyers, environmental lawyers, legal theorists, social theorists, and those concerned with the philosophy and ethics of ecology and the non-human realms.

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.