For decades, the Court of Justice of the European Union has relatively successfully negotiated its way under circumstances which the theory of constitutional pluralism adequately portrays. In part, this achievement is due to the Court’s warranted minimalist approach to adjudication, its way of legal reasoning in interpreting EU law and the techniques with which it reserves space for communication, interaction and even conflict between legal orders. Building on existing accounts of both the Court’s practice and constitutional pluralism, this chapter concentrates on the prerequisite that the members of the community of judicial discourse understand the Court’s established patterns of legal interpretation and reasoning, as well as their role in maintaining the pluralist European legal order.

This chapter assesses the visibility of the environmental role and effect of freight transport in (global) supply chains and questions whether consumers can make sustainable choices based on information available to them. As opposed to being integrated, the European Union’s (EU’s) overall approach to transport is fragmented. The same can be said about the European Commission’s approach to ‘closing the loop’ with a circular economy as well as about carbon emissions in general. However, one key prong of the circular economy package is where all these fragmented strategies should meet: its objective of helping consumers choose sustainable products and services. To reach this goal, consumer information on the environmental impact of products sold in the EU internal market should ideally include transport-related emissions within the value chains – both global and local – in which they are made. This chapter argues that such consumer information is currently missing, and consumers cannot make an overall evaluation of the sustainability of products they purchase. The assessment starts with a practical example from the field of apparel manufacturing and retail and is followed by general reviews of the existing indirectly or directly related EU laws and how they fail to generate information-fuelled consumer behaviour resulting in market-led change. This leads to the question: What could be the role of law in incentivizing market actors (companies and consumers) to make more sustainable choices – aligned with the Commission’s goal – to rise to the challenge of planetary boundaries and circular economy, including harnessing the (global) effects of freight transport?

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the maritime transport industry can be nudged in the direction of more environmental carriage, resulting in fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We argue that in addition to new technical solutions, clean/green-tech, emissions can also be mitigated through an overall shift in the behaviour of the transport industry. This chapter examines the regulatory means already in place regarding GHG emissions from maritime carriage of goods and questions the idea that there is a lack of information on emissions produced by the transport industry. Relying on behavioural insight, this existing emissions information should, however, be utilized in several different ways in order for it to act as a nudge towards choosing more environmentally friendly alternatives for carriage of cargo: to directly influence the choices of shippers or freight forwarders as well as indirectly influence them through better informed end consumers of products carried. These nudges, if successful, would in turn affect the behaviour of the maritime transport industry. Hence, focusing on the carriage of cargo, we explore some ways in which the information on GHG emissions could be integrated into the regulatory framework concerning the maritime transport industry and product labelling. The core idea of this chapter is hence to outline and analyse the potential of combining the information that is already collected on account of environmental regulation with behavioural insight to mitigate emissions of maritime carriage of cargo.