The European Consortium of Political Research held its annual conference in UCD in August 2024. The Dublin European Institute sponsored a panel on Hope, ably chaired by Amy Strecker, UCD. Through a series of four papers the panel investigated the concept of hope through a number of diverse approaches and lenses: Sarah Trotter (LSE) asked what it might mean to construct hope as a right, in particular through the notion of the ‘right to hope’ as articulated by the European Court of Human Rights in recent years; Elen Stokes (UoBristol) examined to what extent and how hope can become an object of investigation in scholarship on environmental law, reflecting on aspirational environmental law duties, the progressive rights of nature, and experimental declarations of climate emergency. Imelda Maher (UCD) explored to what extent law can provide a framework within which individual hope can be realised, collectivised to a group, and aligned with societal values as articulated in foundational legal texts, taking the EU as a case study; and the one political scientist on the panel, Stefan Müller (UCD) analysed what hope can be detected in political texts, presenting findings from the classification of texts of a cross-disciplinary course offered at an Irish university.