Environmental Law

Catalog description

This course begins with a survey of the ecological and economic justifications for government regulation to protect the environment. It then examines different strategies and tools for doing so. The primary focus is on three major federal anti-pollution statutes: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and Superfund. In addition, we will consider the common law as a source of environmental protection, Environmental Impact Statements and other information-based regulatory strategies, and economic instruments such as emission taxes and marketable permits, and the developing law surrounding global climate change. Depending on time and student interest, we may touch on the intersection of international trade and the WTO with environmental protection, the Endangered Species Act, and land use issues. However, this is primarily a course about pollution and the protection of public health; we will not spend much time on natural resource issues, wilderness protection, endangered species, and the like. This is a survey course. Because environmental law is predominantly statutory, students will have to come to grips with some statutory minutia; there is a statutory supplement. The overall goal, however, is not to learn the endless details of these complex statutes but to introduce the basic problems and approaches that characterize contemporary environmental regulation.