This book describes the unique process of legal evolution in the field of environmental law, which is denoted as constitutionalisation of the environmental protection in the EU legal order.
This notion refers to the process of transformation of this particular area of law, which is reflected in its novel autonomous features and materialised through the normative and jurisprudential elevation of environmental objectives and principles. In the course of recent years, environmental protection has evolved from a sectoral policy to one of the core, transversal principles of the EU legal order.
Grasped through the prism of the principles of integration and coherence, the environmental protection has become all-present and influential aspect of EU legislation, while at the same time reaching the status of a fundamental value underlying the constitutional dimension of the European Union as a community of law. The book examines this process on the basis of comparative legal analysis, the current practice of EU institutions, and the recent case-law of the Court of Justice of the EU.
"In a very comprehensive but at the same time well documented and intellectually thorough way, with a wealth of well-chosen references to ECJ and national case law, opinions of advocates general, EU legislative and international law developments as well as to academic work of different origins, she critically analyses a process of constitutionalization of environmental protection in the EU, where individual measures and principles have inspired the emergence of measures and principles of a constitutional nature."
Ben Smulders, book review, Common Market Law Review 57: 1647–1674, 2020Dr. Alicja Sikora is an EU law academic, lecturer and practitioner with more than 15 years of experience in EU litigation, as a Legal Secretary at the Court of Justice of the European Union and as a Legal Advisor to the Council of the European Union. Graduate of Jagiellonian University and Université de Reims, Ph.D. in Law (Jagiellonian University, Cracow), Member of the Polish Bar (Cracow), Alicja Sikora currently acts as a Legal Advisor to the Council of the EU, and is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the Jagiellonian University. Her research interests focus on structural and constitutional aspects of EU law, as well as EU environmental law. She has published on variety of topics, including a monograph on the financial penalties under Article 260(2) and (3) TFEU (Kluwer Poland 2011).