The EU is heavily invested in using law and policy as a means to shape a sustainable future. Especially after the European Green Deal, many instruments have been adopted with an emphasis on a green transition and which have brought about a shift in how the EU regulates finance and business activities in its internal market and beyond.  All the relevant instruments point to the centrality of environmental considerations in EU law making as well as to a heavier focus on businesses’ due diligence and reporting obligations. But where is the ‘social’ in the EU’s pursuit of a sustainable future? The purpose of this special issue is to interrogate precisely this question and to problematise how various EU policies adopted to pursue just transition promote or fail to promote social sustainability. Through a series of contributions drawing on EU and international law, labour law, business and human rights as well as supply chain management perspectives, the authors in this special issue interrogate how law approaches (or neglects) the rights-centered, distributive and participatory dimensions of the green transition in the EU.  They explore the conceptual foundations and limits of just transition; they scrutinise various mechanisms and instruments adopted to pursue social sustainability; and they revisit how economic and social considerations are balanced in different fields of EU law. In so doing, they explicitly and implicitly build on the productive tension between economic governance and social justice, a tension inherent in EU law,  and they collectively map how different areas of EU law understand and interpret their function in the pursuit of a sustainable future.