EU legal scholarship’s recent ‘turn towards society’ demands new approaches to studying how EU law has been experienced and shaped both at present and in the past. Yet, there has been relatively little research on the engagement of societal actors with European law beyond a narrow focus on litigation. This article looks at a more indirect engagement with legal norms. Using the contested compliance with the EC’s 1982 Seveso directive on industrial safety as a case study, it uncovers the pivotal role that individuals and societal organisations played in procedures that have thus far been considered highly institutionalised: the infringement proceedings started by the European Commission. By tracing how the problem of preparing for disaster came to be regarded by societal actors in Italy and the Netherlands as both a legal and a European problem, it advances an approach showcasing that societal actors experienced EU law less as a separate category and more as part of a broader continuum of solutions to a societal problem.

The European Union (EU) Emissions Trading System (ETS) is the cornerstone of the EU’s attempt to decarbonise economic production in Europe. This paper questions the power and class relations that are built into the EU’s choice to address the climate crisis through the legal construction of emissions trading. Drawing on Marxist theory, the paper argues that the cost of emission allowances imposed by the ETS is a form of climate rent. In both the choice of this system and its implementation, the EU prioritises capital accumulation in order to protect the competitiveness of EU firms on the global market. This paper argues that the ETS thus jeopardises the progress of decarbonisation on two grounds. First, the EU’s implementation of the ETS has tended to increase the economic wealth of capital by redistributing economic value away from workers and towards the capitalist class. By raising the cost of essential goods, the ETS will likely damage the reputation of climate action and thus jeopardise public support for decarbonisation. Second, the ETS is part of the EU’s indirect approach to climate policy, which seeks to shape the actions of private capital in the direction of climate objectives. However, the severity of climate change calls instead for the use of law and public power to directly and consciously shape the rapid decarbonisation of society.

This short Introduction outlines the purpose and structure of the Symposium on Ecosystem Restoration and EU Law. It opens by highlighting the potential relevance of the ecological move taken by the EU political institutions in the framework of the Green Deal. It then presents the issues addressed in the Symposium and the main overall argument emerging from its four contributions: whilst the EU ecological policy reflects the intention to shift from the traditional understanding of environmental protection as social regulation to a genuinely ecological and holistic vision, the functional rationale of such a move remains, for the moment, elusive and under-specified. Clarifying such rationale is an inescapable but complex task, as it requires a fresh discussion on the relationship between law and ecology, as well as a true understanding of the implications of ecosystem restoration for the evolving features of the EU polity.

This contribution to the Symposium on Ecosystem Restoration and EU Law assesses the underground protection schemes suggested by the European Green Deal (EGD) for the European Union (EU). By addressing the overground bias that environmental laws and policies have traditionally suffered from, the analysis engages with the EU Soil Strategy for 2030, its ‘Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe”’, and the proposed 2023 Soil Monitoring Directive. The Article explores how and to what extent this agenda for the preservation and restoration of soils is legally reordering the European ground and, simultaneously, how and to what extent it is regrounding the European legal order.