Legislative and Regulatory Process

Catalog description

Legislative and regulatory process is a sophisticated, messy and complex affair but it is has been key to virtually all contemporary environmental advances. Knowledge of that process is fundamental to understanding the history and enactment of the statutes, regulations and decisions that have formed environmental policy for the last 40 years. The course in Legislative and Regulatory Process will exam budget processes, bill drafting, sponsorship, committee and floor rules, parliamentary procedure, constitutional authority, executive vs. legislative authority, role of hearings, majority and minority politics, bicameral structure and process, redistricting, judicial and executive appointments, and more. Its context will be a comparative study of Federal and NYS legislative and regulatory processes. A premium will be placed on student writing as well as research into statutes and their history, meetings with legislative experts, and individual student presentations at term's end regarding a specific environmental law, its history, support and opposition, procedural and substantive hurdles, and impacts.