This chapter reviews the reach of public trust principles across the globe and compares them to a competing model of environmental rights, the rights of nature movement. The former affirms public rights to the environment, while the latter confers rights on the environment itself. Both reflect dissatisfaction with the failure of existing laws to ensure environmental stewardship. The rise of such advocacy responds to the missing foundations for environmental law identified in the Introduction, including weak constitutional foundations in the United States. Exploration begins with a review of public trust principles around the world, followed by a whirlwind tour of global rights of nature initiatives. The rights of nature movement provides an unapologetically biocentric alternative to the inherent anthropocentrism of the public trust and more typical environmental laws, which also premise the value of natural resources on their human beneficiaries – yet they are evolving along similar legal pathways. The chapter concludes with comparative analysis of the two approaches, contrasting the underlying ethics that divide them while recognizing the practical characteristics that unite them.

Chapter 5 examines court cases in Xinjiang (1912–25). Consular officials worked a compromise between administering consular law, carrying out imperial objectives and allowing the jurisdiction of local custom over British subjects. Consuls were aided by aqsaqals, senior merchants who resolved minor disputes of the British communities in various towns. Consuls not only incorporated this indigenous administrative practice into British administration, but also arranged the aqsaqal system that had clear influences from Indian community organisation. The chapter therefore shows how Indian communities and Indian influences shaped British administration in Xinjiang.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central questions: Why have labor activists in Europe turned to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to claim trade union rights, and what impact does this international litigation have on labor movements? While organized labor has historically relied on collective action rather than courts, this chapter situates that shift within broader transformations, including the erosion of union power under neoliberalism and the expanding authority of international courts. Yet the limited reforms states often undertake in response to ECtHR rulings rarely meet activists’ expectations. To explain how international litigation became a resource for workers, the chapter introduces the concept of strategic mobilization of human rights: an instrumental approach in which activists deploy human rights law to pursue concrete goals without necessarily embracing its ideals. Even pending or unsuccessful cases can catalyze social movements and shift political dynamics. The chapter also outlines the book’s methodological approach, which combines an original database of ECtHR labor rulings (StrasLab) with fieldwork on labor movements in Turkey and the UK. Situating the book’s contribution to debates on legal mobilization, labor revitalization, and international courts, it argues that the transformative potential of human rights courts ultimately depends on mobilization from below.

The third chapter explores how Tengyue consuls worked in a court to resolve Sino-British cases involving local populations (1909–35). The court was a reflection of the coming together of local laws and British and Chinese jurisdiction. The consular role was to work alongside Chinese officials and act as linguistic and cultural mediators between these officials and their Burmese counterparts. They therefore balanced British imperial objectives – such as furthering colonial claims to land – with efforts to ensure Chinese cooperation in the resolution of transfrontier cases.

The fourth chapter examines the establishment of extraterritorial jurisdiction in Xinjiang (1880–1918). There, no treaty existed defining consular rights in the province. As a result, the consular official George Macartney carved out his rights through adjudicating Sino-British cases and by diplomatic negotiation with the Chinese authorities. As Macartney worked for the Indian government and, after 1908, was also a China consular official, he therefore bridged the colonial and semicolonial world. From 1918, his legal powers were derived from consular frameworks, but he could apply colonial laws from British India. He also sent suspects and convicts to India, creating an administrative and judicial fusion between the consular and colonial system.

The California Supreme Court’s decision to protect Mono Lake provides a paragon example of how the public trust doctrine can serve as an environmental guardian – as well as a story full of intrigue, suspense, and high stakes. One unusual aspect of the story is that two of the most important characters are neither people nor cities, nor even geological formations on the land – they are laws. In the Mono Lake case, advocates invoked the public trust doctrine to protect public law interests in the environmental values of the waterway, defending them against private law claims to the water within it. To understand how these public and private interests came into conflict at Mono Lake – and why they continue to harbor conflict across all arid lands – it is important to understand the legal doctrines that govern different aspects of water governance. For this reason, the book begins with the law – tracing the history of the public trust doctrine from its ancient Roman and English roots to its reception in the United States, and the conflict posed by independently developing doctrines of private water allocation law, especially the prior appropriations doctrine of the American West.

This chapter reflects on what international human rights litigation has achieved for labor movements in an era of growing repression and backlash against international courts. Focusing on the experiences of Turkish public sector unions and blacklisted workers in the UK, it addresses a central question: Can international courts meaningfully support workers’ rights in the face of neoliberal restructuring and authoritarian resurgence? The chapter argues that while human rights law is no substitute for rank-and-file mobilization, it has provided activists with tools to contest repression, demand accountability, and carve out political space in hostile environments. Legal victories have not reversed the long-term weakening of organized labor, but they have enabled fragile gains – moments of visibility, legitimacy, and mobilization – that matter both symbolically and materially. Labor’s engagement with human rights remains pragmatic, and hence potentially tenuous; but the resources, aspirations, and alliances this engagement leaves behind can seed future movements. Drawing out both the limits and possibilities of international legal mobilization, the chapter closes by emphasizing the enduring struggles and adaptive strategies of labor in hard times.

Recent years have seen great strides in the deepening of our understanding of how sustainability factors – in particular those related to environment, society, and governance (ESG) – may act as drivers of financial risks, and therefore are of relevance to institutions responsible for oversight of the financial sector. This chapter reviews these arguments in the context of the progressive inclusion of sustainability factors in microprudential regulation of the banking sector. New rules at international (Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, Network for Greening the Financial System), regional (European Union), and individual jurisdiction levels require that banks include ESG considerations in their governance. How such rules are implemented on the ground is contingent on the regulatory oversight architecture, that is, how the responsibility for different objectives and financial sectors is repartitioned between different public authorities, as well as the broader institutional framework in which the latter operate. The chapter analyses from this perspective practices of microprudential supervisors in the EU (European Banking Union, Hungary, Sweden) and beyond (Brazil, United Kingdom) that are seen to be leaders in the trend, with a view to distilling the institutional factors shaping the ‘greening’ of supervision with regard to scope of prudential sustainability concerns and the instruments used. Four out of the five studied jurisdictions have delegated banking supervision to the central bank, which is interesting, not least given the significant heterogeneity of financial supervision models globally. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the comparative analysis with regard to legitimacy (e.g. market overreach) and institutional implications (e.g. need for development of accountability, institutional design) of micro-prudential supervision and regulation, in particular with regard to central banks.