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This work presents several different points of view regarding the role of environmental innovation as the driving force of public policy designed to promote sustainabilityand reduce environmental impacts. Environmental innovation is analyzed byexamining concrete practices such as sustainable design, green branding, eco-labeling, the use of medicinal plants, and improved plant varieties, among other things, and the individual and collective intellectual property rights that protect and promote these kinds of innovations. While this thematic diversity is directly proportional to the complexity of the author's presentation, it does not detract from the conceptual unity of the text. On the contrary, by examining the concepts as applied in a variety of contexts, the author highlights not only the challenges that must be faced in order to protect the general interest, but also proposes alternative solutions that promise to improve the structure, emphases, and priorities of these rights. This work represents the culmination of a valuable research project that benefited from the cumulative experience of the author and will be of great interest to scholars in the field, It is an important theoretical contribution to the formulation of strategies for environmental mitigation, adaptation, and recovery.

Can there be such a thing as a European sociology of law? The uncertainties which arise when attempting to answer that straightforward question are the subject of this book, which also overlaps into comparative law, legal history, and legal philosophy. The richness of approaches reflected in the essays (including comparisons with the US) makes this volume a courageous attempt to show the present state of socio- legal studies in Europe and map directions for its future development. Certainly we already know something about the existence of differences in the use and meaning of law within and between the nation states and groups that make up the European Union. They concern the role of judges and lawyers, the use of courts, patterns of delay, contrasts in penal 'sensibilities', or the meanings of underlying legal and social concepts. Still, similarities in 'legal culture' are at least as remarkable in societies at roughly similar levels of political and economic development. The volume should serve as a needed stimulus to a research agenda aimed at uncovering commonalities and divergences in European ways of approaching the law.