As a result, domestic courts and international tribunals are enforcing constitutionally enshrined environmental rights with growing frequency, reflecting basic human rights to clean water, air, land, and environmental opportunity. Courts have even read environmental rights into constitutions that do not explicitly mention them or where judicial enforcement has been nominally withdrawn. Courts in Southern Asia have led the way, inferring environmental rights from other constitutionally entrenched rights, most commonly a “right to life.” This trend has been most notable in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal where such rights have been read in tandem with directive principles aimed at promoting environmental policy to embody substantive environmental rights.

As we shall see, constitutionally embedded rights are both fairly ubiquitous in form, and fairly challenging in function.

Bobby’s constitutionalism beholds and celebrates that "no constitutional truths emanate from either politically unaccountable" courts or from paradigmatically imperfect constitutional legal theories. Rather, Bobby’s constitutionalism was participatory and justificatory: it derives from the Constitution’s republican democracy. The Constitution means what We the People allow it to mean at constitutional inflection points in our nation’s history.

We miss Bobby dearly.

We conclude that judicial receptivity to fundamental environmental rights provisions embedded in domestic constitutions seems to belie predictable patterns. We also conclude that no single explanation emerges for the relative dearth of cases giving force to these provisions. Although courts have not been as enthusiastic to embrace environmental rights as some activists would have liked, there is noticeable and steady progress toward their growing recognition in courts throughout the world. And as constitutional courts become more aware of what their peers are doing, this momentum is likely to increase. Moreover, even where courts have not accepted the constitutional environmental arguments, the mere fact that such arguments are being made and considered augments the attention that constitutional fundamental environmental rights receive in public discourse. And this, in itself, can meaningfully contribute to the success of environmental claims in the future. The result is that collectively the judiciary will continue to play a necessary if not sufficient role in the vindication of fundamental environmental rights worldwide.

None of the environmental cases decided thus far during the tenure of Chief Justice Roberts engage sustainability. The word “sustainability” does not appear to exist before the Court. It does not appear in any majority, concurring, or dissenting opinion. While the Court seems to be agnostic about the idea of sustainability as a governing norm, strong astringent reveals that with some counterexamples the extent to which decisions before the Roberts’ Court regarding biodiversity, land use, air pollutant emissions, and cleanup standards implicate sustainability, they do so negatively, as discussed below. The article concludes that factors having little or nothing to do with sustainability per se are at the heart of these results. Yet unless and until parties amass the courage of their conviction and infuse “sustainability” into litigative lexicon and strategy, sustainability will continue to matter to the U.S. Supreme Court not at all.