The Curious Invisibility of Environmental Rights in the EU Legal Order

The current paper responds to a key puzzle and a question. First, why have environmental rights in the EU legal order been relatively invisible given the potential for rights talk that has been seen in other countries and other policy areas? And second, with Daniel Kelemen’s influential work on Eurolegalism arguing that the EU has become much more reliant on US-style adversarial legalism, including a shift towards rights-based litigation, do EU environmental rights fit the picture Kelemen has painted, or are they an exception? The paper explores the visibility of EU environmental rights at EU level and, using the UK as a case study, in a Member State. Where such rights have been invisible, it seeks to explain the possible reasons for that lack of visibility.