Using Law to Advance Sustainability: The Law of Sustainable Development

Sustainability and law as a social tool behold linkages that strengthen one another, although this conjunction is frail when analyzed under the typical standards and paradigm of most contemporary legal systems. The role of law under sustainability must be carefully profiled and differentiated as compared to the rest of legal rules. Even though it is true that all legal rules are created and implemented with the main purpose of improving human interaction, the role of law oriented towards sustainability should be the protection and preservation of natural resources, elements, as well as the conditions associated to these in order to guarantee the development and well being of the human race. As it has been declared by other environmental law scholars, there should be a “sustainable development law”, referring to the fact that certain sustainability based main principles should be introduced and recognized considering that the largest and most widely spread legal systems were unable to recognize them. The identity of a new legal paradigm strongly based on the current environmental paradigm should be recognized and legal systems throughout the globe should implement and enforce it in order to assure a sustainable development approach through law. Any argument of modern environmental law should be based in several focal aspects that will be identified, reasoned and proposed in this paper, as well as this proposed identity and character of the modern legal paradigm which embraces and strengthens sustainability