Academia
Comparing U.S. Universities’ Environmental Programs
When the U.S. News rankings came out, naturally I looked first at the rankings for environmental law. But then I got curious about the rankings for other environmental fields. I had very little idea, for example, about how ecology departments were ranked. Of course, we all know about the issues with U.S. News’s methodology. …
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CONTINUE READINGRemedial Education for Berkeley Law Faculty
Or at least for John Yoo, who argues: Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn’t the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are …
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CONTINUE READINGCongress Increases Climate Research Funding!
…even if they didn’t intend to. The Republican War on Science has morphed into a more general war on knowledge. As Dan has pointed out previously, the GOP has now declared war on social science funding, and particularly on political science. Last night, the Senate accepted the amendment of Senator Tom Coburn (R – Olduvai …
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CONTINUE READINGCan Universities Be The Future Home of Environmental Journalism?
Consider me somewhat skeptical of the arguments, well-presented by Jayni, that The New York Times’ killing of the Green blog will somehow enhance the paper’s environmental coverage. It reminds me a little of the attempts of law schools to teach ethics not with a specific class but with the suffusion method: it’s an easy way …
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CONTINUE READINGAn ELQ twofer
My apologies to the folks at ELQ — I missed their last publication date. (Hint: please send one of us a heads up when an issue comes out if you want it posted on LP.) So here are links to the articles in the latest two issues, Volume 39 issues 3 and 4. Of course, …
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CONTINUE READINGLaw 2050 — a new “legal futurism” blog
JB Ruhl at Vanderbilt University has launched a new blog called Law 2050. He describes the blog as “a forum for envisioning the future of law, legal practice, and legal education,” or in shorthand “legal futurism.” That’s obviously not limited to environmental law, but his examples (not to mention the fact that JB has been …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Law and the Two-Year Law Degree
There’s been talk recently about requiring lawyers to have only two years of law school, maybe with a follow-on year of apprenticeship. If this change takes place, will students still be able to study specialized courses like environmental law? For instance, to get an environmental law certificate at Berkeley, at student needs to take six …
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CONTINUE READINGDoes the President Even Need the Senate to Confirm Appointees?
Damn. I suppose that it’s an occupational hazard of law professors that they kick around an idea, only to find that someone has beaten them to the punch. Well, Harvard’s Matthew Stephenson has done that to me, sort of, with an essay in the most recent volume of the Yale Law Journal entitled, Can the President Appoint Principal Executive …
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CONTINUE READINGDworkin Does Dallas
The death of Ronald Dworkin last week was not merely an event for legal philosophers, but really for anyone concerning with the law, for Dworkin might have been the pre-eminent legal theorist of the last century. The legacy of his ideas is too broad and deep for a blog post, but his notion of law-as-integrity …
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CONTINUE READINGDonald Rumsfeld’s Tips for Law Teachers
Today in Land Use class, I had an abysmal time attempting to teach Avco v. South Coast Regional Comm’n, a 1976 California Supreme Court case that is crucial in understanding the “vested rights” doctrine. Avco holds that a developer has vested rights to develop only when 1) it relies on a permit; and 2) has …
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