This article undertakes a systematic analysis of environmental litigation at the Court of Justice of the European Union, focusing primarily on preliminary reference procedures initiated by civil society actors. It does so in order to provide a basis for future research that goes beyond individual case studies. Central take-aways are strong geographical disparities in cases brought by individuals and environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs), with many cases from Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands and very few cases from Spain, Greece and Portugal. Cases brought by individuals are equally numerous as cases brought by ENGOs, suggesting that ENGOs are not the only beneficiaries of the procedural innovations precipitated by the Aarhus Convention. Finally, companies are the most frequent litigants in environmental cases. Not all such cases challenge environmental obligations, but the significant number of cases that do, even where they are directed at individual decisions rather than policies, pose significant questions about the cumulative effects of such litigation.

Public participation in artificial intelligence (AI) development by public administrations is increasingly proposed as a potential silver bullet for mitigating the risks associated with the use of AI in the public sector. This paper examines whether public participation can serve as a viable solution from a doctrinal and practical perspective by analyzing the availability of legal avenues for natural and legal persons to participate in AI development procedures by the EU and member states’ public entities. While the idea is appealing, there are significant obstacles. Notably, EU law currently lacks specific legal frameworks to enable public involvement in the design and development of AI systems by public entities. Neither traditional European administrative law nor the new Artificial Intelligence Act provides effective legal avenues for involving the broader public in AI development in the public sector, posing challenges to implementing meaningful participation. Furthermore, drawing an analogy from environmental law, where public participation often ends up being formalistic and ineffective, suggests that similar outcomes might arise in the context of Public-Sector AI development. Therefore, despite the theoretical advantages of involving the public, this paper argues that, without robust legal structures and meaningful procedural designs, public participation in Public-Sector AI development may ultimately fall short of achieving its promises, proving to be a dead end.

In 2022, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decided the case Oglala Sioux Tribe v. United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Like similar cases, the plaintiffs, the Oglala Sioux, challenged a US federal agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, over their granting of a permit to an industrial project, in this case a uranium mining project. The Oglala Sioux argued that the agency’s environmental impact statement (EIS) was incomplete and inadequate. The court rejected the Oglala Sioux’s arguments, decided that the EIS was sufficient, and ruled in favor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Critically, even though the agency did not follow EIS procedures completely, the court applied several exemptions allowing the EIS to stand. As in other EIS cases in recent years, Oglala Sioux highlights the limitations of environmental law in the protection of US communities’ local environments and cultural heritage.

Sámi reindeer herders employ a snow taxonomy that challenges intellectual property law’s foundational distinction between natural phenomena and cultural creation. Terms like seaŋáš (granulated depth hoar, density 267 kg/m3, formed through constructive metamorphism) and čearga (wind-packed snow, density 250–450 kg/m3, creating impenetrable grazing barriers) represent systematic organization of environmental knowledge that extends beyond linguistic classification to describe snow conditions actively created through traditional herding practices. This article argues that traditional snow taxonomies deserve intellectual property protection as cultural artifacts created through sustained human–environment interaction. Analysis of Sámi terminology reveals systematic coordination of physical properties, temporal patterns, spatial distribution, and functional implications for reindeer herding—intellectual achievement that transforms continuous environmental variation into discrete cultural categories embedding sustainability ethics and practical wisdom. Three doctrinal extensions provide protection: database copyright for systematic knowledge organization under Feist Publications’ creativity standard; collective trademark protection for terminology functioning as cultural identifiers; and geographical indication protection for snow conditions created through traditional landscape management. Climate change strengthens these arguments by blurring natural–artificial distinctions as human activities increasingly influence Arctic conditions.

The public local inquiry in the planning system is expected to facilitate public participation in environmental decision-making. Public participation in environmental decision-making has the aim of enhancing environmental democracy, making better decisions and improving environmental protection. This paper argues that, despite the long history of participation in the planning system, public local inquiries in their present state are limited in their capacity to facilitate public participation. It contends that the public participation responsibilities of the public local inquiry are hampered by its adversarial procedures. Planning scholars have argued that the formal, adversarial nature of the public local inquiry makes it difficult for people with little legal experience to participate, thus acting as an obstacle to public participation and good decision-making. Drawing on inquiry case law and scholarship, this paper investigates the multiple purposes of the inquiry and how tensions between these purposes have been interpreted by the courts. In exploring the reasons for these conflicts, the paper provides an opportunity to refine the system to facilitate public participation and to ensure that the public local inquiry is fair to its participants and serves the democratic purpose it is expected to meet.

Policymakers often cite a need to balance, or trade off, the protection and restoration of the natural environment on the one hand, and the extractive use of the environment for economic reasons on the other. This tension is inherent in the goal of ‘sustainable development’, which, despite providing a conceptual basis for Western environmental and conservation law, has also been criticized for legitimizing socio-ecologically destructive practices. This tension comes to the fore in the New Zealand government’s Fast-track Approvals Act 2024, which, to prioritize economic development interests, circumvents prior environmental and conservation law safeguards, as well as constitutional protection for the rights of Indigenous Māori. We undertook a contextual legal analysis of the fast-track legislation, demonstrating how it works to undermine conservation outcomes and Indigenous rights. Our findings hold particular significance for scholarly and policy debates about transnational environmental law, especially the contribution of Indigenous knowledge and law in a multi-level governance context. We argue that centring relationality in environmental law frameworks might help to shift away from binary approaches to environmental law, which trade off economic versus environmental and cultural interests.

Under the notion of the twin transition, the green and digital transitions were conceptualised as a synergetic pair that should pave the way for a globally competitive green and digital Europe. But are European digital and environmental laws truly twins within the EU’s regulatory strategy, suggesting parallel approaches? In this article, we take a formal approach, focusing on regulatory instruments that are employed in both areas and their defining characteristics. While the twin transition in some respects blurs the boundaries between environmental and digital law, including through the integration of environmental considerations into digital regulations, we adopt an analytical distinction between the two domains. Through a series of steps, we identify key differences that set both regulatory approaches apart and help us understand the different trajectories the transitions have taken. Contrary to the often-invoked claim that form is substance, the analysis reveals that the choice of regulatory instruments does not inherently determine substantive policy choices, thereby underscoring the necessity of their comparative examination. Ultimately, the article argues that fostering dialogue between the two policy fields may yield valuable insights into how regulatory tools can be adapted and deployed across domains.

Human rights litigation increasingly confronts claims that environmental degradation violates duties owed to future generations, yet existing doctrinal frameworks struggle to give these intergenerational obligations concrete effect. This article argues that the constructive trust offers a more coherent and workable private-law architecture for intergenerational equity than the public trust doctrine that dominates current scholarship and climate litigation strategies. The article traces the intellectual genealogy of intergenerational obligation in ideas of stewardship, usufruct and equity, and shows how these motifs have been channelled into trust-based vocabularies. Following this, it surveys international and domestic case law in which courts acknowledge temporal dimensions of environmental harm but hesitate to constitutionalise a general public trust, and highlights four structural defects that render public trust theory jurisdictionally fragile and remedially weak. The latter portion of the article develops an account of constructive trust reasoning grounded in unjust enrichment and unconscionable retention of benefits and shows how this framework can be used to attach proprietary consequences to profits generated by rights-violating environmental conduct, without requiring recognition of future generations as current rights-holders. The article concludes that constructive trust logic is transferable across legal systems, because it aligns with civil-law regimes of unjust enrichment, patrimonies by appropriation and constitutional environmental rights provisions. It further contends that an intergenerational constructive-trust approach can supply some of the ‘missing architecture’ of intergenerational justice within contemporary human rights law.

Large grant-making philanthropic foundations in the UK and the EU can have a significant influence over environmental law and as such are worthy of more attention from environmental law scholars. Through analysis of publicly available documents, we identify in this paper an absence of consistent transparency by these foundations. This makes their influence hard to understand, hard to research, hard even to see at work in the world. Transparency is complex and challenging, however. And so, rather than berating problematic approaches, we explore through interviews with actors in the field, as well as the academic literature, both the difficulties that foundations experience in pursuing transparent practices and the benefits of transparency. We conclude by identifying some principles for improved visibility of foundation work.

In this article, I study non-material harm in cases of environmental liability. Environmental tragedy does not only come at great economic cost but often also brings about non-material loss – that is, loss that has no market value. In order to better recognize, assess, and measure this type of harm, more insight is needed into its psychological conception and parameters. Departing from the available legal frameworks on non-material harm in Belgium as well as in the Netherlands, I study how environmental psychology can help in recognizing, assessing, and measuring environmental non-material harm. More specifically, I focus on solastalgia, a notion that describes the psychological impact of negatively perceived changes to a familiar environment. Solastalgia describes a crisis of identity as a result of a disturbance in the way in which humans inhabit their environment. It describes a form of ecological grief over the loss of a familiar place – that is, the aggregate meanings, values, familiarity, and predictability attached to a specific environment. Using the available theoretical framework around solastalgia and the available empirical insights in the solastalgia literature, I show that solastalgia qualifies as a valid type of harm and bears significant advantages when implemented in environmental tort law frameworks.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.