The Constitutional Foundation and Limitation of the Environmental Levy in Taiwan

The legal measures of environmental protection are fairly diverse which include prohibitive, economic, informational, and organizational measures. This paper aims at exploring the Constitutional foundation and boundary requirements for using economic measures in the field of environmental law with a specific emphasis on the guiding or restraining functions of the Constitution on economic measures in the environmental field. This paper firstly discusses the foundations and connotations of the Constitution for environmental protection from the Article specified in the fundamental national policies that takes both environmental protection and economic development into consideration. It then examines environmental protection from the perspective of fundamental rights as well as the vertical separation of powers and its practice in the filed of environmental protection. Thirdly, this paper focuses on exploring environmental levy as the mandatory connotation of judicial formulation in concretizing the Constitution. For this part, this paper specifically discusses the relationship between the environmental protection Article and other relevant constitutional provisions and explores how the state select environmental regulation measures to concretely actualize the purpose of environmental protection and delineate the connection with the Constitution. Lastly, it investigates the judicial structure of the environmental levy to further explore the function of formulating connotations through the Rule of Law embedded in the Constitution.
Author: Prof. Dr. Yun-Ju Wang