Alicja Sikora-Kaléda

Alicja Sikora-Kalėda, Dr hab., is an EU law academic, lecturer and practitioner with more than 20 years of experience in EU law and litigation. Her monograph “Constitutionalisation of environmental protection in EU law” (Europa Law Publishing 2020) received wide acclaim and was awarded a First prize in the LVIII Polish Academy of Sciences National Contest for the best habilitation monograph in 2023 in Poland. Since 2022 she has been an academic coordinator of the Jean Monnet Module “Sustainability and Climate Change in EU Law” within the Chair of European Law at the Jagiellonian University. Since 2017 she has been acting as a Legal Advisor to the Council of the European Union and the European Council. Between 2004 and 2017, Alicja Sikora -Kalėda was acting as a Legal Secretary (référendaire) at the Court of Justice of the European Union. She is a Member of the Polish Bar (Cracow). Alicja Sikora-Kalėda obtained a habilitation degree in law at the Jagiellonian University (Poland) in 2022. She is an Associate Member of International Academy of Comparative Law since 2021 and an Associated Researcher at Centre d’étude du droit de l’environnement (CEDRE) of the UCLouvain Saint-Louis University (Brussels) since 2020. Dr hab. Alicja Sikora-Kalėda has been Senior Lecturer at the Law Faculty of the Jagiellonian University since 2013, where she obtained her Ph.D. in Law in 2011. She is a graduate of the Jagiellonian University (2002) and Université de Reims-Champagne-Ardenne (2003). Her research interests focus on the constitutional aspects of EU law, including the system of judicial protection and fundamental rights as well as the EU environmental and climate law. She has published on a variety of topics, including a monograph on the financial penalties under Article 260 TFEU (Kluwer Poland 2011).

Contact: aes10221@nyu.edu

Research Project

(Re)constructing legitimacy: mapping the substance and limits of the EU’s emerging environmental constitutional identity. The EU’s efforts to address climate change and, more globally, other environmental considerations, involve a far reaching legal, political and axiological transformation. Such a great transformation enhances the need of legal coherence and conceptual harmony, which in turn requires reaching to the fundamental principles that pertain to the legitimatory foundations of the EU. Whilst the Union’s ambition of becoming a climate-neutral society is translated into hundreds of new legislative measures, to make transformative dynamics viable, one must embrace the consolidating agents of the Union’s constitutional dimension and consider (re)constructing the legitimacy of the EU itself. In the framework of the constantly evolving EU legal order and, in particular, drawing upon the recent jurisprudential developments of the EU Courts establishing the concept of the “very identity of the Union”, the purpose of this project is to research the potential environmental dimension of the EU’s constitutional identity and its meaning for legitimising the Union as a unique legal and political community. This research project focuses on identifying the EU’s emerging environmental constitutional identity by looking at the values, principles and judicial responses. Defining the content and boundaries of the EU’s emerging environmental identity is far from a theoretical exercise given its relevance for the construction and consolidation of the EU’s input legitimacy. It equally plays a crucial role in navigating through complex choices ahead for the Union. In particular, recent judicial conversations around the globe echoing the climate change related concerns or reflecting their intergenerational nature, are liable to persuasively influence the EU’s genetic code. Finally, mapping the emerging EU’s environmental constitutional identity would be incomplete without discussing its limits, in particular in relation to other concepts of the EU’s constitutional discourse. The need to ensure equilibrium between conflicting considerations is an intrinsic part of each constitutional order, and EU legal order is no exception.