legal scholarship

U.S. Climate Law: A Broad & Rapidly Growing Field

There’s a lot of law relating to climate change. A lot!

In preparing to teach a course on climate law, I was really struck by how broad and rich the field has become. Back in the day, it was nearly all international law, but nowadays there’s a huge amount of U.S. domestic law. Most people, even those who work on the field, tend to focus on …

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The Origins of Climate Awareness in the Legal Academy

Forty years ago, the legal academia was getting its first glimmering about climate change.

Today, climate change is the central, though by no means the only, concern in environmental law. Awareness of the issue began slowly, however. Westlaw searches for “global warming” and “greenhouse effect” pick up only a handful of citations before 1985. The earliest mentions of these terms in the law review literature came in the late …

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Citations for environmental and energy law scholars 2021

The most-cited environmental and energy law professors from 2016-2020

Brian Leiter at Chicago is once again doing his occasional series identifying the top cited legal scholars in the United States in a range of substantive areas. As I did the last time Leiter posted these totals, I thought it might be helpful to our readers to have a list that is focused on US …

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Citations for environmental and energy law professors 2018

The most-cited environmental and energy law professors in 2013-17

Brian Leiter at Chicago is again doing one of his occasional series identifying the top cited legal scholars in a range of substantive areas.  One of the lists he did covered public law scholars including environmental law– however, his list includes a number of top administrative law scholars who do not focus on environmental and …

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More great environmental and energy law scholarship

Some of the best articles in the field from 2016-17

Some of our readers may be interested in what is happening in environmental and energy legal scholarship.  So I thought I’d post again (I also did this in 2016) about the Land Use & Environment Law Review, which is Thomson Reuters/West Publishing’s peer-selected annual compendium of significant legal scholarship in land use and environmental law.  …

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The Horse Manifesto

“The Law of the Horse” is a disparaging term for a legal field. We should embrace it.

It’s fairly common to refer to environmental law or energy law as being like the Law of the Horse – implying that they are somewhat ersatz legal fields. For those who are not familiar with the reference, The Law of the Horse was apparently the title of a legal treatise that collected all the cases …

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Law School News: Sunstein Returns to Harvard

The White House announced that Cass Sunstein will be leaving OMB at the end of the month to return to Harvard Law School.  Sunstein was not popular with environmentalists– I have heard people say that he was worse than some of the OMB heads who served under Republican presidents.  He also doesn’t seem to have …

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Legal Scholarship on Climate Change

I did a survey of all articles with “climate change” in the title in the past couple of years, and then did a rough breakdown of topics.  Although the survey was  unscientific, the results were intriguing: Topic Number of Articles Adaptation Biodiversity and public lands 11 Governance 5 Public health 1 Water 6 Economics 9 …

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