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. 

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.

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.

An overview of the environmental impacts of agriculture, U.S. agricultural policy, the Farm Bill, genetically modified crops, organic farming certification, and international trade and environmental agreements that influence agricultural practices in the U.S.

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.

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.

Examines the nature of the arbitration process, rules governing hearings, the relationship between arbitration and the court system, the enforceability of agreements to arbitrate,  and judicial review of arbitration award.  This course also explores the controversial areas of arbitration such as requiring arbitration in employment and consumer contracts. 

An examination of what biodiversity is, the growing threats to it, and U.S. and international laws to combat those threats. The course focuses on current controversies to highlight legal, scientific, and political strategies for protecting biodiversity. Particular emphasis is placed on the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

The Arctic generally is considered the least studied and most poorly understood area on Earth. At the same time, global warming has reduced ice cover and thus increased pressure to allow industrial activities such as oil and gas development in Arctic waters. This course explores the pressures to develop America’s Arctic, the legal structures pursuant to which development decisions are and should be made, how the Deepwater Horizon disaster has influenced those decisions, and what development of the Arctic means for local residents, the United States, and the world. Throughout the course, the role in shaping the law of science, and impacts to Arctic indigenous peoples and the environment will be addressed.

An overview of the environmental challenges for China's 1.3 billion people and the efforts to address them through law and regulation. Includes an introduction to the political and legal system and cultural background of the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, and surveys 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. 

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. 

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.

An examination of environmental justice from an environmental law and a civil rights law perspective, including how environmental justice issues are framed, addressed, and resolved through litigation and mediation in the U.S.  Also a study of how developing countries and countries with economies in transition face numerous challenges in their efforts to achieve sustainable development.

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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.

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.

The principles of European environmental law and techniques for environmental management with particular emphasis on nature conservation law, environmental impact assessment, integrated pollution control, waste management, climate change, and the enforcement of environmental law at EU and Member State levels.

This course considers the rules governing the admissibility of testimonial, physical, documentary, and demonstrative evidence in trials and other formal legal proceedings. Among important topics considered are authentication, relevance, hearsay, opinion and expert testimony, impeachment, and privileges. The course utilizes discussion problems, traditional case materials, the Federal Rules of Evidence, and simulations to illustrate concepts being discussed. Students will participate through problems and simulations.

Explores the links in theory and in law between the enjoyment of internationally recognized human rights and protection of the environment through the study of case law finding environmental degradation to constitute a breach of established human rights, and through the analysis of the value and limits of procedural rights and remedies in environmental law.

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.

In the international arena, students study treaties that may provide remedies for harm caused to humans and to natural resources by activities such as transporting oil in tankers, burning fossil fuels, and exporting hazardous substances. They also study many efforts to prevent harm rather than to remedy it. Comparative law issues range from how similar, environmentally based disputes between private parties might be resolved in a wide variety of legal and social systems, to a detailed comparison of environmental legislation in two federal systems and their member states—the U.S. and the European Community.