Courses

This seminar provides an opportunity to explore emerging issues in dispute resolution through research and writing. The goal is to produce a publishable quality article.

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Provides in-depth exposure to the most useful, efficient strategies and resources for environmental law research, including highly specialized information databases, advanced administrative law research, legislative history, and environmental news/updating services.

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This course addresses the fundamental crisis in which growing energy demands are threatening the buffering capacity of our global atmosphere, while also producing the greatest emissions of most primary pollutants, and the struggle to identify and create the legal elements necessary to promote and ensure solutions.

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This course will illustrate how animal lawyers are advancing the U.S. legal system in the interest of protecting all animals. Although our laws view animals as personal property, these lawyers and policymakers craft legal and policy arguments, and act on innovative litigation strategies, to keep the law evolving.

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A discussion of legal rights for nonhuman animals, the sources and characteristics of fundamental rights, why nonhuman animals are presently denied them, why all humans are presently entitled to them, whether they should be available for nonhumans under the common law and, and what strategies are available for obtaining them.

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An overview of the tremendous environmental challenges for the 1.3 billion people in China and the efforts to address them through law and regulation. After an introduction to the political and legal system and cultural background of the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, we will survey the basic regulatory schemes managing air quality, water resources and quality, natural resources, environmental impact assessments, and pending legislation concerning waste management and energy conservation. If there is sufficient interest, we may offer an additional, optional, one-credit session in China immediately following the class, to let students experience firsthand the environmental conditions and lectures and meetings with leading Chinese environmental scholars and activists.

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Examines assumptions underlying environmental, constitutional, corporate, and other laws, and how those assumptions impede our ability to live cooperatively and sustainably with the natural world. Identifies legal, governance, and economic systems that better recognize the inherent rights of all people and the natural world.

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Explores the principles of ecology using an interdisciplinary approach and field-based work. Course work stresses the inventorying of biotic and physical components of a landscape, examining how these components are distributed, and determining what forces drive these patterns. Topics include interpreting the natural and cultural histories of a landscape, biodiversity conservation, and the scientific method, among others.

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This course will focus on the conservation theory behind landscape scale projects and specific implementation actions. Case studies will draw conclusions for lawyers and practitioners. The course will involve lectures and discussion. Materials will draw on actual cases and projects involving The Nature Conservancy and other conservation organizations.

This course will introduce students to the liability, diligence and drafting issues that arise in complex environmental business transactions, such as the purchase and sale of major assets, real property and company stock.

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Explores the range of processes that are used to resolve environmental disputes with particular emphasis on consensual processes such as negotiation and mediation.  Instruction will be based on lectures and discussions of the theory of dispute resolution and environmental law and simulations to practice the skills needed to resolve environmental disputes.

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'Introduction to the enforcement of federal pollution control laws and a discussion of the basic regulatory structure of those laws and the enforcement tools available to regulators. Covers civil and criminal enforcement and alternatives to traditional command-and-control regulation and enforcement for gaining compliance with environmental standards.

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This course examines the issue of environmental justice from an environmental law perspective and from a civil rights law perspective. It explores how environmental justice issues are framed, addressed, and resolved through litigation and mediation in the U.S. and internationally.

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An introduction to the broader categories of protecting human health and the environment  to both assess the successes and failures of environmental protection in the U.S. and gain more detailed substantive knowledge of several key statutes.

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Explores the intersection between international environmental law, the law of armed conflict, and international humanitarian law, and the role of environmental protection in post-conflict reconstruction. An overview of relevant international law and an exploration of the role of international environmental norms in conflict and post-conflict situations.

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Considers the rules governing the admissibility of testimonial, physical, documentary, and demonstrative evidence in trials and other formal legal proceedings.  Topics considered include relevance, prejudice, competency, hearsay, opinion, impeachment, and privilege.

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This course explores the global challenge of feeding the world, protecting forests and other natural landscapes, and reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. What legal and other strategies can the world use to meet food needs, stop converting natural habitats, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture to an acceptable level?

Consumer demand for environmental-preferential products is increasing. Whether intentional or not, the potential to greenwash consumers has also grown. In this course students will consider legal decisions and public policy questions raised by environmental claims and rapidly evolving methods of marketing – print and television to social media and mobile devices.

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Examines the unique body of law governing "Indian country," the geographic areas recognized by the federal government as the homelands of sovereign American Indian tribes. Major topics include the history of federal-tribal relations, tribal property rights, tribal court systems, and the balance of governmental power between tribes, states, and the federal government.

This course will examine a cutting-edge area of environmental advocacy. Under the umbrella of sustainable development, the course brings together the points of contact between three areas of international law, namely investment, human rights, and the environment, which together form one of the most dynamic areas of international environmental advocacy today. The course will explore how the various treaties underlying these three regimes relate to one another, with a particular emphasis on dispute settlement. In this context, the seminar will examine conflict of norms and hierarchy issues, as well as interpretative tools to prevent or minimize conflict. Besides these theoretical inquiries, the course will cover particular themes where human rights, environmental, and investment law interact, such as: the right to health, the right to water and sanitation, due process and denial of justice, property rights and expropriation, and stabilization clauses and positive human rights obligations. The course will place special emphasis on bilateral investment treaty negotiations, as well as on international investment arbitrations involving health, safety and environmental measures.

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