试题出自试卷《华东政法大学2016年考博英语真题》

Ⅵ. International environmental law seems to have reached an impasse. This is hardly surprising: the complexity of environmental problems, even when considered apart from underlying social, political, and economic factors, is staggering. Scientific understandings of environmental degradation and its causes evolve rapidly. The underlying causes of such degradation are very often activities that bring significant social and economic benefits, with the result that political authorities have no wish to prohibit or strictly regulate them; incentive structures may often constitute a more promising avenue. The complexity of questions about human impacts on the environment and how to decrease or mitigate them calls for a high degree of specialization, while at the same time requiring coordinated action on a number of fronts. In light of these challenges, international environmental law has followed a trajectory that seems inevitable: from general rules whose vagueness often impeded their usefulness to highly specialized, technical regimes focused on narrowly-defined phenomena and interacting with each other in a rather hesitant and clumsy fashion, and more recently to the acceleration of transnational, including non-state, regime building. It becomes increasingly difficult to discern the particular contribution that law can make to environmental protection as it takes on the role of handmaiden to science, economics, politics, ethics, and other social systems.
In his discussions of the managerial mindset and the demoralization of law, Koskenniemi frequently makes reference to environmental law, notably to the carving out of implementation and compliance procedures from the general law of state responsibility, to the increased resort to soft law, and to the heavy reliance on equitable balancing. A brief sketch of the architecture of international environmental law reveals vague, general principles at one end; highly detailed and technical rules and standards articulated at the level of specialized regimes at the other end; and a series of potentially useful but underspecified — and, unfortunately, largely uninfluential — procedural rules between the two. Furthermore, a large number of general principles and regime-specific standards take the form of soft law. Attempts to flesh out a series of general rights and obligations for states (and potentially for other actors, as well) have been ongoing, but those efforts seem to have faltered with the publication by the International Law Commission (ILC) of the 2001 Draft Articles on Prevention of Transboundary Harm from Hazardous Activities and the 2006 Draft Principles on the Allocation of Loss in the case of Transboundary Harm arising out of Hazardous Activities.
1.International environmental law seems to have reached an impasse NOT because ___.
2.International environmental law has followed a path from ___ to ___.
3.Koskenniemi uses environmental law to illustrate ___.
4.Between the two ends of international environmental law are ___.