Academia
Environmental 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 …
Continue reading “Environmental Law and the Two-Year Law Degree”
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 …
Continue reading “Does the President Even Need the Senate to Confirm Appointees?”
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 …
Continue reading “Dworkin Does Dallas”
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 …
Continue reading “Donald Rumsfeld’s Tips for Law Teachers”
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 …
Continue reading “The Talmud and the Endowment Effect”
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 …
Continue reading “A New Feast for Environmental Policy Wonks”
CONTINUE READINGIf the Constitution is Dead, where does that leave Takings?
Justice Scalia is getting a lot of attention for his comment that the Constitution is “dead, dead, dead”, but obviously he didn’t mean that the Constitution is no longer in effect. (See? Intent theory sometimes is helpful, Nino.). Rather, he meant that the Constitution does not have a meaning that changes over time. It has …
Continue reading “If the Constitution is Dead, where does that leave Takings?”
CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s AB32 as a Field Experiment
In modern academic economics, many scholars are running field experiments. I can point you to researchers such as John List of University of Chicago or Esther Duflo of MIT. In this 8 minute video, I sketch the simple economics of why it is very important for someone to run this field experiment for learning how …
Continue reading “California’s AB32 as a Field Experiment”
CONTINUE READINGUniversity of Washington Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop
The University of Washington Law School has issued a call for papers for its 2nd Annual UW Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop. The workshop will be held July 10-12, 2013, on the UW campus in Seattle. Here’s their description of the event: This collegial two-day workshop features discussion of works-in-progress by ten early career environmental …
Continue reading “University of Washington Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop”
CONTINUE READINGJoin Our Mailing List
Climate policy is changing rapidly. Stay in the loop with expert analysis via email Monday - Friday.
