EU Environmental Law

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. The European Union (EU) has developed a vast body of environmental law, relying on a treaty title setting out normatively and descriptively complex environmental principles and approaches, as well as on those parts of the treaties focusing on the internal market. This chapter provides some introductory insights into EU environmental law. It explores that the Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) shows the potential of an approach to governance that sets environmental norms in a collaborative, problem-solving forum beyond the face of legislation. The chapter shows harmonization is not a straightforward category in EU environmental law. Much was made of the decentralization and local or national flexibility in the predecessor to the IED. By comparison, the IED places greater emphasis on the mandatory application of EU-wide environmental standards. However, both the initial decentralization and the recentralization are highly ambiguous

Theorising international environmental law

From The Oxford Handbook of International Legal Theory (Florian Hoffmann and Anne Orford, eds, Oxford UP, forthcoming 2014). --- This paper, part of a larger work on international law theory, sketches some early lines of inquiry towards a theoretical understanding of international environmental law. As the body of international law regulating human interaction with the natural world, one might expect this branch of law to be a cornerstone of the international system. Yet in practice, international environmental law's reach is strikingly circumscribed. Little of the governance of natural resources, for example, is 'environmental'. Subsisting at the periphery, environmental law focuses on conserving particular (rare, exotic) species and 'ecosystems', and curbing certain kinds of pollution. Its principles are vague, peppering the margins of rulings within other judicial fora: it is quintessential soft law. In this paper, we suggest that international environmental law's dilemmas are due to two competing heritages. On one hand, this law enshrines the peculiar pantheism of the European romantic period, positing the 'natural world' as sacred, inviolable, redemptive. On the other, its main antecedents are found in colonial era practices, which provided the data for the earliest environmental science and a laboratory for prototypical attempts at conservation and sustainable development. Caught between irreconcilable demands, international environmental law struggles today to avoid utopian irrelevance or nugatory paralysis

Dolphin Bycatches in Tuna Fisheries: A Smokescreen Hiding the Real Issues

The taking of dolphins in Tuna Fisheries has attracted a lot of attention in both law and science. The problem assumed international significance in the wake of the two General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) panels on imports of tunas. This article addresses the issue of incidental bycatch in fisheries generally and avers that dolphins are but one of the numerous species that are taken incidentally in commercial fisheries. It argues that the bycatch problem should be approached from a broader perspective that takes into account whole ecosystems and diverse interests in fisheries. It then posits possible ways of encouraging more selective fishing techniques that minimize overall bycatches