Academia

An inconvenient truth

A new paper in the Marine Ecology Progress Series open access journal (peer-reviewed) tells it like it is in ways that environmental scientists are often reluctant to do.  Authors Camilo Mora and Peter F. Sale took a very big-picture look at how well reserves are protecting biodiversity, on land and at sea. The analysis is …

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New UCLA Report Takes on California’s Groundwater Management

It’s still the wild west in California when it comes to groundwater management. California depends heavily on groundwater as a source of water supply, but is one of only two western states–the other being Texas–that allows for the withdrawal of groundwater without a permit or any other means of tracking and regulating users.  Perhaps not surprisingly, …

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Marcilynn Burke appointed Acting Assistant Secretary

Marcilynn Burke, who is on leave from her environmental law teaching gig at the University of Houston, has been named Acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Department of Interior.  Burke has been at Interior since August 2009, when she was appointed Deputy Director for Policy and Programs at the Bureau of …

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A New Environmental Journal

Transnational Environmental Law (TEL) is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of environmental law and governance beyond the state. It approaches legal and regulatory developments with an interest in the contribution of non-state actors and an awareness of the multi-level governance context in which contemporary environmental law unfolds in a global context.  (Full disclosure: …

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White paper on Habitat Conservation Plans and Climate Change

Cross-posted at CPRBlog. Melinda Taylor at the University of Texas School of Law and I have just put out a white paper on Habitat Conservation Plans and Climate Change: Recommendations for Policy.  It can be accessed here through Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, or here through UT’s Center for Global Energy, …

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Environmental Law Scholarship: A Sampler

If you’re wondering what environmental law scholarship is about, here’s about three-weeks-worth of recent publications, covering everything from roadless rules to fisheries to renewable energy to climate change. 1.    Aarons, Kyle J. Note. The real world roadless rules challenges. 109 Mich. L. Rev. 1293-1325 (2011).   2.    Blades, Emmi. Comment. Using the legal system to …

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In Memoriam: David Getches

We are very sorry to report the death of David Getches, who was the Raphael J. Moses Professor of Natural Resources Law at the University of Colorado School of Law.  His fields were water law, public land law, environmental law, and Indian law.  Professor Getches several books on water law and one on Indiana law. …

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Environmental Law and “The Law of the Horse”

“The Law of the Horse” is the title of the (perhaps apocryphal) treatise on the same subject.  The point of the reference is that “there’s no there there,” as Gertrude Stein might have said: the law of the horse would simply be a compendium of contract cases that happened to involve horses, tort cases that …

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Sea-Level Rise Rockets Ahead Due to Climate Change

Here’s a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: An international research team has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and has shown a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature …

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A Note to Environmental Scholars

…and to all scholars, really.  You are not an explorer. Now that the academic year is over and I’m finally getting the time to write, I’ve been looking through scholarly abstracts.  In literally dozens of them, the author says that he or she is “exploring” a particular issue or topic.  What’s wrong with that?  It serves …

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