Academia

A Legal Planet Milestone

The blog has now had more than two million views since its founding.

I’m pleased to announce that the number of hits on Legal-Planet.org has just passed the one million mark.  Before we switched to the new site in 2013, we had amassed over a million hits at our previous site, so the blog is now past the two-million mark since the blog was founded in March 2009..  That …

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Auctioning the Upzone: A New Strategy for Inducing Local-Government Compliance with State Housing Policies

New White Paper by U.C. Davis Law Professors Recommends Market-Based Tool to Incentivize Intensified Urban Development in California and Beyond

(Note: the following post was co-authored by U.C. Davis School of Law Professors Chris Elmendorf and Darien Shanske; the white paper discussed in the post is their work product.)  California’s housing policies–a topic that for years received precious little attention from state officials–has suddenly become the Golden State’s hottest political and policy issue.  The California Legislature passed …

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Guess What? It’s THAT Time of Year.

Yes, it’s fundraising season. And yes, we’re asking you to help out.

Yes, it’s fundraising season. And yes, we’re asking for your help on this Giving Tuesday — not for our own sakes, but because we think the work we’re trying to do on climate change and other issues is important. Like everyone else, I’m sure you find fundraising appeals annoying.  That’s why we hardly ever do …

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Then and Now

How has environmental law changed in the last 38 years? A lot … and not that much.

I recently happened to remember a funny incident from 1980. The first edition of what was then the Findley & Farber casebook went to the publisher in October of 1980.  I remember vividly encountering a colleague in the hallway who asked cheerily if the book had gone to the printer. When I said yes, he …

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Survey: What Are The Most Important Cases for Environmental Law?

A new survey asks environmental law practitioners and academics about which Supreme Court cases they think are the most important to our field. Photo by Hugo Chisholm, Flickr.

I am writing to invite you to participate in a survey that I trust you will find interesting and fun. In 1999 and 2009, JB Ruhl (Vanderbilt Law School) and I surveyed environmental law practitioners and academics about which Supreme Court cases they thought were the most important to our field. The 1999 results were published in ABA’s Natural Resources …

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What’s New Under the Sun?

New Book Demonstrates the Hidden History of Climate Science

It’s a great regret of mine that I did not study the history of science either as an undergraduate or in graduate school. Then, it seemed to me like an arcane, recondite field — almost bizarre. Boy, was I wrong. Now in my rapidly advancing dotage, I recognize how it touches on so many of …

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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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UCLA’s Environmental Law Clinic Files Brief on Behalf of Amici League of California Cities and California State Association of Counties

Brief defends local government authority to regulate oil drilling in face of industry challenge

[Update: The Second District Court of Appeal, Division 5 has rejected all the amicus curiae brief applications filed in this case, including this brief. We will leave this post, and the link to the brief, up on this blog so that anyone interested may see our arguments, but the brief will not be considered in …

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Progress on California water data

Michael Kiparsky and Alida Cantor

Water data has become quite a hot topic in California, and rightly so: throughout the state, decision-makers desperately need better information to guide their efforts to better manage this resource. Recent legislation has gotten us to the starting line, but how well new data platforms ultimately serve water management will depend on clear thinking and …

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