This chapter traces the ECtHR’s growing authority and legitimacy in the post-1990 era to explain how it emerged as a new legal venue for workers marginalized by domestic neoliberal restructuring. Based on original data compiled in StrasLab, a comprehensive database of ECtHR labor cases, the chapter offers a systematic account of how labor rights claims have gained ground within the Court’s evolving jurisprudence. It analyzes how the Court’s interpretation of key Convention provisions gradually expanded to cover a wide range of issues, including dismissals, wage cuts, surveillance, discrimination, forced labor, workers’ health and safety, and trade union rights. Zooming in on trade union rights, the chapter identifies three temporal shifts in the Court’s jurisprudence. During the initial period, the ECtHR largely adhered to a narrow reading of labor rights and rejected most claims. This was followed by the golden years for trade unions at the ECtHR, when the Court significantly expanded protections under Article 11 and issued groundbreaking rulings advancing trade union rights. In recent years, however, mounting political backlash has led to a more cautious posture: while the Court has refrained from rolling back existing protections, it has hesitated to extend them further.

Some forty years after the aqueduct first began tapping the Owens Valley, L.A. leaders realized that the city needed still more water. They also realized that there was a wealth of unappropriated water in the next watershed up, just 200 miles further north – the Mono Lake Basin. This chapter explores the extension of the aqueduct to the Mono Basin in 1940 and the acceleration of Mono exports after the second barrel was built in 1970. It begins by introducing the extraordinary features of the Mono Lake ecosystem itself – the trillions of brine shrimp, clouds of alkali flies, and millions of migratory birds that depend on a hypersaline sea – suspended in a high-desert basin marked by dormant volcanism, geothermal activity, and limestone tufa towers rising from calcium laden springs entering Mono’s carbonate-rich waters. It also reviews the human communities of the Basin, including the indigenous Kutzadika’a Paiute and the European settlement that followed the California Gold Rush. Finally, it explores the human and environmental consequences that followed Los Angeles’s acquisition of rights to take water from the Basin, setting the stage for the legal controversy that would follow.

The role of central banks has always evolved in response to political and economic events. In 2015, when the UN Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement were signed, awareness of the importance of climate change and other sustainability risks for their mandates began to grow in the central banking community. Physical risks and transition risks can act as powerful channels impacting banks’ businesses and balance sheets and the economy more broadly, affecting both price and financial stability. Laying the analytical groundwork for the following chapters of the book, this chapter embeds their recent concern for sustainability risks and policies in the dynamic role central banks have played historically. It also discusses how central banks have coordinated their policies internationally, such as through the Network for Greening the Financial System and the Financial Stability Board. While climate change and climate-related risks have been dominating these policies, central banks have started shifting their attention also towards other aspects of environmental sustainability, including biodiversity loss. Aspects of social sustainability have received significantly less attention in central banking policy circles. However, the potentially dis-equalizing side effects of extended periods of quantitative easing have fostered central banks’ interest in the inequality dynamics of monetary policy.

This book explores the development of one of our oldest legal principles – the public trust doctrine – which holds that some natural resources are so important to everyone that they cannot belong to anyone, and so the government must protect them for the benefit of all the people. Framing the core public trust principle as a partnership of sovereign obligations and environmental rights, it examines how trust principles fill an important gap in environmental law – and perhaps even constitutional law. The book highlights the epic tale of the fall and rise of Mono Lake – the strange and beautiful Dead Sea of California – and how groundbreaking litigation protecting it became an inflection point in the development of the trust as a tool of environmental law. It explores how the common law doctrine became tasked with protecting environmental interests, and how public trust principles have been instantiated in wider legal frameworks to protect an even broader array of natural resources, including climate stability. The Introduction traces how the doctrine buttresses inherent weaknesses in the foundations of U.S. environmental law, providing needed support for environmental governance.

As environmental devastation in the Mono Basin gathered speed, local resistance gathered force. Scientists who studied the unique geologic and biological resources in the area raised the alarm of impending ecologic collapse. Residents feared for their health and their livelihoods, as water exports eroded the lake at the center of their public lands tourism economy. Gradually, a coalition of locals, students, scientists, birders, fishers, hunters, lawyers, politicians, and government agency staff coalesced around the idea that something had to be done. This chapter explores how that unlikely coalition joined together to mobilize political support for the lake’s preservation, reviewing the origins of the Mono Lake advocacy movement and the strategic legal and political choices they made in laying foundation for the eventual litigation.Volunteers launched a state-wide campaign to “Save Mono Lake,” raising awareness while cultivating relationships with the Angelenos who relied on exported Mono Basin water. The campaign eventually drew inspiration from a good idea, published by a legal scholar and championed by a student who read it in college: the common law public trust doctrine.

This chapter shifts attention to the indirect effects of international litigation, specifically, how grassroots mobilization can be shaped in the shadow of official law. It examines the case of the Blacklist Support Group (BSG), a network of construction workers in UK who were blacklisted for their union activism. Even without favorable rulings from the ECtHR, BSG activists used the litigation process to amplify their claims, attract media attention, and apply political pressure. The chapter introduces the concept of “on-stage” and “off-stage” mobilization to describe how workers adopted an instrumental approach to human rights, invoking them in public campaigns while continuing to ground their internal discourse and solidarity ties in class-based themes. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, media coverage, and parliamentary debates, the chapter shows how BSG’s strategic mobilization of human rights yielded concrete victories – including major settlements, exclusion of blacklisting firms from public contracts, and formal investigations into police surveillance – that reshaped the political terrain for labor activism.

More and more supervisors embark on the climate stress testing journey, which is still, even though progress has been made over the last years, new ground for supervisors and financial institutions alike. Good practices and practical guidelines are a crucial element for the industry to further progress and align on climate stress testing practices. This chapter provides an overview of key design considerations for climate stress testing and their differences from traditional stress testing, whereby the focus is on conducting such exercises for supervisory (i.e., microprudential) and institution-specific purposes.

The chapter analyses how the climate change action plan developed by the European Central Bank (ECB) as part of its monetary policy strategy review in 2020-2021 is aligned with the ECB’s mandate set out in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the Treaty on European Union. The Treaties require the ECB to integrate climate change considerations into its monetary policy and to contribute to the EU’s objectives regarding climate change, as established by Regulation (EU) 2021/1119, the European Climate Law. However, there are also legal limits on the action the ECB can take in this field. The chapter examines the key measures proposed as part of the plan from a legal perspective, including measures related to macroeconomic forecasts and models, the collection of statistical information for climate change risk analysis, the enhancement of risk assessment capabilities, asset purchase programmes, and possible changes to the collateral framework. It also considers the questions regarding the ECB’s democratic legitimacy and accountability that arise in this context.

The second chapter demonstrates how the movement of different people, such as migrant labourers and itinerant domiciled subjects, shaped colonial and extraterritorial law (1911–25). Consuls petitioned for greater powers of deportation to remove unwanted Indian migrants across the frontier. Consuls also petitioned the metropolitan, Indian and China consular authorities to enable Burmese officers to exercise colonial law across borders by virtue of extraterritoriality. This chapter is therefore concerned with the relationship between borders, colonial law and extraterritoriality.