Students of EU judicial politics have debated the credibility of legislative override as constraint on the behaviour of the European Court of Justice. Yet because of the high political hurdles for the passage of treaty amendments, treaty revision has been dismissed as the "nuclear option", exceedingly effective but difficult to use and, therefore, unlikely to impact judicial decision making. However, when treaties are being renegotiated, the ability of member state governments to pass treaty amendments to either punish or reward the Court is greater. This, we argue, may induce the Court of Justice to display more leniency towards member states in cases coinciding with ongoing Treaty negotiations. To test this hypothesis we examine the outcome of all infringement cases adjudicated between 1961 and 2016. We find that the ECJ is significantly less likely to render adverse rulings in cases concomitant with the final, most salient stage of treaty negotiations. Our analysis suggests that the relationship between Treaty revision and judicial behaviour may be more nuanced than commonly assumed in the literature.

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The European Union has some of the world's most ambitious and highly developed environmental laws on its books, but their effectiveness is severely compromised by non‐compliance. With the UNECE Aarhus Convention (1998), Europe launched an innovative legal experiment, democratizing environmental enforcement by conferring third party citizens and environmental non‐governmental organizations (ENGOs) with legal rights of access to environmental information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental matters. Based on some 2000 surveys and over 150 interviews with stakeholders from three Member States – France, Ireland, and the Netherlands – we adopt a holistic, 360° perspective, capturing the views of regulated parties, NGOs, and the general public on this private governance experiment. Our data provide important new insights into the practical effectiveness of Europe's laws enabling private environmental enforcement, its (intended and unintended) effects on farmers' compliance decisions in the vital area of nature conservation, and how law might be used to stimulate pro‐environmental predispositions.

People over the course of history have survived by developing their ability to ‘sense’ their environment as an embryonic form of citizen science. With the emergence of modern states, governments have assumed responsibility for monitoring the quality of the environment, and progressively the practice and role of citizen science has changed. This review explores the different manifestations of citizen science over time, with a focus on its law and governance dimensions, reading this evolution as a critical analysis of the current discourses around citizen science. The evolution of citizen science throughout history and its transformation shows certain patterns that are highlighted in this article as ‘constant’ features, whereas other features are instead interrupted and reversed, and new ones emerge. We thus examined citizen science over time by asking what is really new about this phenomenon, focusing on constants—permanent features—and turning points—changes in direction. We argue that these dynamics are central to understanding the promises and perils of the practice, to fully grasping the forms of uninvited, reactive environmental citizen science and to scoping foreseeable future scenarios.

European environmental governance has radically transformed over the past two decades. While traditionally enforcement of environmental law has been the responsibility of public authorities (public authorities of the EU Member States, themselves policed by the European Commission), this paradigm has now taken a democratic turn. Led by changes in international environmental law and in particular the UNECE Aarhus Convention (UNECE, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention (1998). Convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (the Aarhus Convention), signed on June 25, 1998.), EU law now gives important legal rights to members of the public and environmental non-governmental organisations (“ENGOs”) to become involved in environmental governance, by means of accessing environmental information, participating in environmental decision-making and bringing legal proceedings. While doctrinal legal and regulatory scholarship on this embrace of “bottom-up” private environmental governance is now substantial, there has been relatively little quantitative research in the field. This article represents a first step in mapping this evolution of environmental governance laws in the EU. We employ a leximetrics methodology, coding over 6000 environmental governance laws from three levels of legal sources (international, EU and national), to provide the first systematic data showing the transformation of European environmental governance regimes. We develop the Nature Governance Index (“NGI”) to measure how the enforcement tools deployed in international, EU and national law have changed over time, from the birth of the EU’s flagship nature conservation law, the 1992 Habitats Directive (Directive 92/43/EEC). At the national level, we focus on three EU Member States (France, Ireland and the Netherlands) to enable a fine-grained measurement of the changes in national nature governance laws over time. This article introduces our unique datasets and the NGI, describes the process used to collect the datasets and its limitations, and compares the evolution in laws at the international, EU and national levels over the 23-year period from 1992–2015. Our findings provide strong empirical confirmation of the democratic turn in European environmental governance, while revealing the significant divergences between legal systems that remain absent express harmonisation of the Aarhus Convention’s principles in EU law. Our data also set the foundations for future quantitative legal research, enabling deeper analysis of the relationships between the different levels of multilevel environmental governance.