General Course Descriptions for Terms: environmental law
815 - Appellate Advocacy (moot court - Environmental Law)
848 - Environmental Law
918 - SP International Law: International Environmental Law
940 - Legislation & Regulation
This course provides an introduction to the federal laws and governmental institutions that shape significant aspects of social and economic policy. The course addresses legislation, statutory interpretation, regulation and administrative agencies. Legislation and regulation play the dominant role in shaping law and governance in the modern American legal system. While numerous other law school courses involve statutes and regulations or legislatures and administrative agencies, this course considers the overarching questions about these laws and institutions: how statutes are enacted and agency regulations issued, what tools lawyers use to shape statutes and regulations, how judges interpret them, etc. The main goal of the course is practical. All lawyers, irrespective of the area of law—from securities law to criminal law, from environmental law to tax, from labor and employment law to contract drafting, from military law to bankruptcy, etc.—must understand statutes and regulation. This course is aimed at providing students with a deeper understanding of these forms of law and the institutions that make this law, and to help them better appreciate the role that lawyers play in the American legal system as it operates in practice. To think like a lawyer, and hence to represent or advise clients, requires an ability to do so in the context of the regulatory state. This course meets the Legal Process graduation requirement. Learning Outcomes: (i) To understand the role of legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts in the legal process. (ii) To understand the relationship between and among these institutions. (iii) To understand the role that lawyers play in furthering their clients’ interests in each of these institutions. (iv) To understand the differences in the forms of legal argument that occur in these different institutions. (v) To understand how courts interpret statutes. (vi) To understand how administrative agencies interpret and implement statutes. (vii) To understand how courts oversee the interpretation and implementation of statutes by administrative agencies.
988 - SP Environ Law: Natural Resources Law
This course covers the law and policy of the disposition and use of natural resources in the United States. We will emphasize federally owned and managed resources, especially the nearly one-third of this country’s land area that is owned by the federal government, although you will also learn a little about the management of state and private lands as well. Main topics include the history of public land law; the constitutional basis for federal control of natural resources, and legal doctrines and principles that cut across the whole field. We will study two important statutes that, while often included in environmental law curricula, are equally pivotal to natural land use and management in the United States: the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. We will then turn to studies of particular types of resources, including fisheries, wilderness and recreational areas, water, rangelands, federally owned minerals, and forests. Although the general public often perceives natural resources law as part of “environmental law,” natural resources law, as presented in law school courses and casebooks, covers the government’s role as owner and regulator of publicly owned resources, such as land and use of navigable waters. In contrast, environmental law tends to focus on the regulation of private conduct to minimize and provide remedies for various forms of pollution of natural resources. Natural resources law follows a property law model, whereas environmental law’s common law heritage is traceable first and foremost to tort law. While having taken environmental law will, like a number of other courses (structural constitutional law; federal courts; legislation), prove helpful for your studies of this course, it is not a requirement, and I will not assume knowledge of environmental law.