“…As Mann (1993) points out, where particular forms of (environmental) welfare and (environmental) rights are promised, they often come to be expected, and formal regulations as well as widely embraced environmental ideals, even when far from realized in practice, can provide legal and political footholds for nongovernmental organizations and publics to press for meaningful state-led environmental change. 6 Environmental advocacy groups, for instance, have successfully used the courts to expand environmental welfare provision in the United States over the past several decades, pushing for more expansive interpretations of waters governed by the Clean Water Act (Rea 2019), marshaling the politics of expertise to force the regulation of greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act (Freeman and Vermeule 2007), and using the ESA to inject environmental considerations into infrastructure projects in ways never anticipated by the statute's authors (Petersen 1999;Scoville 2022). Even comparatively marginalized and distinctively "outsider" environmental justice organizations have made inroads into the U.S. environmental state, albeit with marginal effects (Harrison 2019;Perkins 2022).…”