Does Sustainability Tell Courts How to Decide? – City Law Forum
‘Sustainability is everywhere now. It turns up in all-staff emails and new module titles, in strategy documents and calls for papers, and mostly we let it pass without asking what it commits us to. The familiar objection is that the concept is anthropocentric, that it manages nature for human benefit rather than valuing it in its own right. That objection is real, but it is also well worn, and a narrower question seems to me more revealing. When a statute or a treaty commits us to sustainable development and a dispute reaches court, does the concept help the judge decide the case? The suggestion here is that it does very little, because sustainability lacks what might be called an adjudicative architecture: the machinery a claim needs before a court can act on it, an account of who may sue, of what counts as harm, and of what a court may order. Constitutional rights supply that machinery, and the rights of nature increasingly do too. Sustainability does not.’
City Law Forum, 15th July 2026
Source: blogs.city.ac.uk
