Implementing Environmental Law


Book Description

This insightful book explores why implementation of environmental law is too often ineffective in achieving effective environmental governance. It provides careful analysis and innovative proposals to help improve the practical effectiveness of legal i




Environmental Law and Policy


Book Description

Environmental Law and Policy is a user-friendly, concise, inexpensive treatment of environmental law. Written to be read rather than used as a reference source, the authors provide a broad conceptual overview of environmental law while also explaining the major statutes and cases. The book is intended for four audiences ? students (both graduate and undergraduate) seeking a readable study guide for their environmental law and policy courses; professors who do not use casebooks (relying on their own materials or case studies) but want an integrating text for their courses or want to include conceptual materials on the major legal issues; and practicing lawyers and environmental professionals who want a concise, readable overview of the field. The first part of the book provides an engaging discussion of the major themes and issues that cross-cut environmental law. Starting with the first chapter's brief history of environmentalism in America, the second chapter goes on to explore the importance and implications of basic themes that occur in virtually all environmental conflicts, including scientific uncertainty, market failures, problems of scale, public choice theory, etc. It then presents three dominant perspectives in the field that drive policy development ? environmental rights, utilitarianism, and environmental justice. Chapter Three fills in the remaining legal background for understanding environmental protection, reviewing the theory of instrument choice, the basics of administrative law, core concepts in constitutional law (e.g., takings, the commerce clause), and the doctrines associated with how citizen groups shape environmental law (such as standing). The second part of the book examines the substance of environmental law, with separate sections on each of the major statutes. International issues such as ozone depletion, climate change, and transboundary waste disposal are also addressed. These chapters build on the themes and conceptual framework laid down in the first part of the text in order to integrate the discussion of individual statutes into a broad portrait of the law.




The Making of Environmental Law


Book Description

The unprecedented expansion in environmental regulation over the past thirty years—at all levels of government—signifies a transformation of our nation's laws that is both palpable and encouraging. Environmental laws now affect almost everything we do, from the cars we drive and the places we live to the air we breathe and the water we drink. But while enormous strides have been made since the 1970s, gaps in the coverage, implementation, and enforcement of the existing laws still leave much work to be done. In The Making of Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus offers a new interpretation of the past three decades of this area of the law, examining the legal, political, cultural, and scientific factors that have shaped—and sometimes hindered—the creation of pollution controls and natural resource management laws. He argues that in the future, environmental law must forge a more nuanced understanding of the uncertainties and trade-offs, as well as the better-organized political opposition that currently dominates the federal government. Lazarus is especially well equipped to tell this story, given his active involvement in many of the most significant moments in the history of environmental law as a litigator for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, an assistant to the Solicitor General, and a member of advisory boards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Ranging widely in his analysis, Lazarus not only explains why modern environmental law emerged when it did and how it has evolved, but also points to the ambiguities in our current situation. As the field of environmental law "grays" with middle age, Lazarus's discussions of its history, the lessons learned from past legal reforms, and the challenges facing future lawmakers are both timely and invigorating.




The Environmental Rights Revolution


Book Description

The right to a healthy environment has been the subject of extensive philosophical debates that revolve around the question: Should rights to clean air, water, and soil be entrenched in law? David Boyd answers this by moving beyond theoretical debates to measure the practical effects of enshrining the right in constitutions. His pioneering analysis of 193 constitutions and the laws and court decisions of more than 100 nations in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa reveals a positive correlation between constitutional protection and stronger environmental laws, smaller ecological footprints, superior environmental performance, and improved quality of life.




Towards the Environmental Minimum


Book Description

A practical human rights approach strengthens environmental protection without requiring radical departures from established protection regimes and legal principles.




Legal Rights for Rivers


Book Description

In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the USA. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources? To assess what it means to give rivers legal rights and legal personality, this book examines the form and function of environmental water managers (EWMs). These organisations have legal personality, and have been active in water resource management for over two decades. EWMs operate by acquiring water rights from irrigators in rivers where there is insufficient water to maintain ecological health. EWMs can compete with farmers for access to water, but they can also strengthen collaboration between traditionally divergent users of the aquatic environment, such as environmentalists, recreational fishers, hunters, farmers, and hydropower. This book explores how EWMs use the opportunities created by giving nature legal rights, such as the ability to participate in markets, enter contracts, hold property, and enforce those rights in court. However, examination of the EWMs unearths a crucial and unexpected paradox: giving legal rights to nature may increase its legal power, but in doing so it can weaken community support for protecting the environment in the first place. The book develops a new conceptual framework to identify the multiple constructions of the environment in law, and how these constructions can interact to generate these unexpected outcomes. It explores EWMs in the USA and Australia as examples, and assesses the implications of creating legal rights for rivers for water governance. Lessons from the EWMs, as well as early lessons from the new ‘river persons,’ show how to use the law to improve river protection and how to begin to mitigate the problems of the paradox.




Environmental Rights


Book Description

A comprehensive and systematic guide to environmental rights and their relationship with standards of protection globally, nationally and locally.




Endangered Species Act


Book Description

"As Secretary of the Interior, implementing the Endangered Species Act was one of my most important, and challenging, responsibilities. All who deal with this complex and critical law need a clear and comprehensive guide to its provisions, interpretation, and implementation. With chapters written by some of the foremost practitioners in the field, the new edition of Endangered Species Act: Law, Policy, and Perspectives is an essential reference for conservationists and the regulated community and the attorneys who represent them."---Bruce Babbbitt, former Secretary of the Interior --




The Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law


Book Description

The second edition of this leading reference work provides a comprehensive discussion of the dynamic and important field of international law concerned with environmental protection. It is edited by globally-recognised international environmental law scholars, Professor Lavanya Rajamani and Professor Jacqueline Peel, and features 67 chapters authored by 76 renowned experts in their fields. The Handbook discusses the key principles underpinning international environmental law, its relevant actors and tools, and rules applying in its substantive sub-fields such as climate law, oceans law, wildlife and biodiversity law, and hazardous substances regulation. It also explores the intersection of international environmental law with other areas of international law, such as those concerned with trade, investment, disaster, migration, armed conflict, intellectual property, energy, and human rights. The Handbook sets its discussion of international environmental law in the broader interdisciplinary context of developments in science, ethics, politics and economics, which inform the way in which environmental rules are made, implemented, and enforced. It provides an introduction to the foundations of international environmental law while also engaging with questions at the frontiers of research, teaching, and practice in the field, including the role of Global South perspectives, the contribution made by Earth jurisprudence, and the growing role of a diverse range of actors from indigenous peoples to business and industry. Like the first edition, this second edition of the Handbook is an essential reference text for all engaged with environmental issues at the international level and the applicable governance and regulatory structures.




Global Environmental Law


Book Description

All around the world, nations have established legal frameworks to protect our environment. While many of these frameworks share similar goals and objectives, they hold important differences as well. In Global Environmental Law, Justice Ricardo Luis Lorenzetti and Professor Pablo Lorenzetti offer a holistic view of modern environmental law. In it, they describe the history and purpose behind environmental rule of law, delve into the nuances of varying regulatory structures, and offer insight into how environmental law is implemented around the world--be it voluntary or mandatory. The book also includes an annex that illustrates how environmental law is changing across the globe--a must have resource for today's legal scholars and practitioners.