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| Franklin Park postcard, c. 1930-1945 Boston Public Library, public domain |
I wrote about the case in the lower court at some length in 2024. The Emerald Necklace Conservancy and local residents wanted to stop the road construction and structural overhaul to bring White Stadium in Boston's Franklin Park into service as stadium host of Boston Legacy, a football club in the U.S. National Women's Soccer League. The "Emerald Necklace" is an urban greenway that landscape architect Franklin Law Olmsted planned to encircle Boston and was widely disrupted in the city's 20th century growth.
The court affirmed on various grounds, and two are of interest to me relative to environmental litigation. First, the court held that The Emerald Necklace Conservancy lacked standing to challenge the project as a violation of terms of the trust that supports the existing stadium and park.
This result is not unusual; environmentalist standing has been a challenging plaintiff problem since I studied environmental law decades ago. (Hat tip to Profs. James Boyle & Jonathan Weiner.) But the outcome shows that that's still so. The doctrine of locus standi in the European Union and elsewhere looks like standing in U.S. constitutional law, but is not as prohibitive, and in many jurisdictions—such as Malawi, where I traveled this summer—legislators have enacted workarounds to allow conservation organizations to respond to industry abuses that endanger human welfare.
Second, the court held that the Massachusetts legislature removed the stadium property from park status no later than 1950, thus depriving the plaintiffs of a claim to which they might otherwise be entitled under Amendments Article 97 (Article XCVII) of the Massachusetts Constitution, a conservation measure that voters approved overwhelmingly in 1972.
Article 97 interests me because of its potential breadth. Its first paragraph articulates a powerful affirmative right: "The people shall have the right to clean air and water, freedom from excessive and unnecessary noise, and the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic qualities of their environment; and the protection of the people in their right to the conservation, development and utilization of the agricultural, mineral, forest, water, air and other natural resources is hereby declared to be a public purpose."
This language dates to the same year, 1972, as the Clean Water Act in federal law, and the likes of article IX of the Montana Constitution, which sustained the youth climate claim in Held v. Montana in 2024. The language weirdly resonates with later constitutional expressions of environmental rights elsewhere in the world, such as South Africa's (article 24).
Thus far, however, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has interpreted Article 97 narrowly, only in connection with designated park land and only as implemented by the legislature—so hardly a constitutional right at all.
The case is Emerald Necklace Conservancy, Inc. v. City of Boston (Mass. Aug. 19, 2026). Justice Gabrielle R. Wolohojian wrote the unanimous opinion of the court.
