Defensive Environmental Constitutionalism: American Possibilities
Sam Bookman* | 26.5 | Citation: Sam Bookman, Defensive Environmental Constitutionalism: American Possibilities, 26 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 73 (2024).
Constitutional environmental rights are in vogue. In the United States and across the world, plaintiffs frequently claim that their governments, in failing to adopt and implement sufficiently ambitious policies, have violated constitutionally-protected rights to an environment of a certain quality. Such claims have garnered considerable success in many jurisdictions. And in the United States, the first such successful claim was recently accepted by a state trial court in Montana. Environmental rights are imagined as a valuable weapon to be wielded against recalcitrant governments.
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*Graduate Fellow, Harvard Safra Center for Ethics; SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School.