International Environmental Law Ulrich Beyerlin, Thilo Marauhn The new edition of this market leading textbook offers the most current overview of international environmental law. Written for students and practitioners it provides a fresh understanding of international environmental law as a whole, seen in the light of climate change, biodiversity loss, and the other serious environmental challenges facing the world. The new edition retains the manageable size of the first, with careful selection of topics and the adoption a cross-cutting synthesis of regulatory interaction in the field. It also places international environmental law in the broader context of public international law in general, revealing at the same time that international environmental law is experimental ground for developing new legal approaches towards global governance. Combining theory and practice, clarity and comprehension, the authors have written a textbook which should be required reading for all students of the subject.

This article focuses on the various ‘twilight’ norms at the bottom of the normative hierarchy of modern international environmental law, such as ‘precaution’, ‘polluter pays’, ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, ‘equitable utilisation of shared natural resources’, ‘intergenerational equity’, ‘common concern of mankind’, and ‘sustainable development’. It discusses these ‘twilight’ norms in current international environmental law, and examines how legal experts and scholars assess their nature and normative quality. Given the ongoing controversy and considerable confusion concerning the status of these norms, as well as the roles they play and the effects they have, it is useful to analyse the phenomenon of ‘relative normativity’ in current international environmental law in more detail. Ronald Dworkin's legal theory, which separates ‘policies’ from ‘legal principles’ and ‘legal rules’, may help in this respect. The article also considers the principle not to cause transboundary environmental damage and environmental impact assessment.

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