Academia
Can 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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CONTINUE READINGThe Talmud and the Endowment Effect
The endowment effect is one of the most important aspects of behavioral economics. It postulates that losing something is worse than gaining something is good. One can easily see it applied to various aspects of property law: it is worse to lose a piece of property that you think is yours than to gain a …
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CONTINUE READINGHarvard Offers A Natural Experiment for Testing Whether Place of Work Determines Where We Live
Readers of this blog are well aware that fossil fuels aren’t correctly priced to reflect the social cost of their consumption. Many economists believe that the U.S gas tax should be at least $1 higher per gallon. In the absence of such Pigouvian Pricing, there is a negative carbon externality associated with living further from …
CONTINUE READINGA New Feast for Environmental Policy Wonks
The Winter 2013 issue of the always-invaluable Journal of Economic Perspectives is just out, and it is a treasure for environmental policy people. It features a symposium on tradeable pollution permits, with contributions from among others William Pizer and Robert Stavins. It not only reviews the history of tradeable permits in air pollution, but also …
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