This collection of essays adopts a distinctive approach to environmental legal issues. The contributors represent a variety of specialisations, ranging from public law to international law and international relations. Some essays are written from within a UK domestic law perspective, but others adopt a broadly comparative, supra-national or international approach.

The contributors do not assume that problems and solutions in 'environmental law' should be perceived as wholly distinct from the preoccupations of existing legal specialisms. New and proposed legal responses inevitably build on or employ established legal techniques, rather than starting completely afresh. The contributors do however, regard environmental problems as posing or at least illuminating significant challenges to received patterns of legal thought. In the light of this, the contributors therefore investigate aspects of law's influnce in environmental decision-making, and consider whether legal institutions and forms of thought can respond adequately to the challenge of environmental change.