Academia

National Academies Press makes reports available for free

Early this month, the National Academies Press, which publishes National Research Council reports like this recent one on America’s Climate Choices, announced that it will make all pdf versions of its publications available for free downloads. Anyone who does research on environmental science or policy (among other topics) should be happy to hear this news. …

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A Friendly Note to Richard Muller

Richard Muller is a Berkeley physicist who has expressed skepticism over the integrity of some climate science.  For example, he suggested that the famous hockey stick might be a distortion because the only sources with temperature readings that go back far enough in time might be located near heat sources. Not surprisingly, climate deniers and their political …

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Highlights from a Property Exam

It’s springtime, so a professor’s fancy turns to — grading exams.  Well, not fancy, but it is part of the job — perhaps the most boring. That’s why I’m so grateful to those students who inject levity into the task — whether they intended to do so or not.  Students are writing quickly, so sometimes …

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May 23rd Sacramento Lunchtime Panel on Meeting California’s Renewable Energy Goals

For Legal Planet readers who will be in the Sacramento area next Monday, UCLA and UC Berkeley Schools of Law will be hosting a free lunchtime panel on policies to help California meet its renewable energy goals.  The keynote speaker will be Ken Alex, Governor Brown’s Senior Advisor and Director of the Office of Planning …

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Good news, bad news on understanding climate science: WaPo and Los Alamitos ed boards

You can’t get to good climate policy if policymakers don’t believe (or don’t profess to believe) that there’s a problem to fix.  With this truism in mind, it’s kind of a “two roads diverged in the woods” morning for understanding climate science and policy. First we have the editorial board of the Washington Post, not …

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New Legal Planet iPhone/iPad app provides easy mobile access to blog

I know many of you wake up daily wondering whether there might ever be a way to bring Legal Planet directly to your iPhone or iPad, with features such as push notifications, easy scanning and scrolling of recent content, designation of unread and previously-read posts, saving of favorites, and easy emailing of posts to friends …

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The Public Trust Doctrine: A Prophet Without Honor

  Michael C. Blumm and R.D. Guthrie of Lewis & Clark Law School have an interesting new paper soon to appear in the U.C. Davis Law Review, pointing out that the public trust doctrine has assumed enormous significance in the jurisprudence of several countries around the world, including India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Uganda, Kenya, South …

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The Expanding Number of Environmental Law Teachers

In a previous posting, I remarked on the increase in the number of publications in environmental law. I thought it would be useful to look at the number of law professors in the field. This was not a rigorous social science survey, so the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. Some caveats …

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Think Tanks, Advocacy Tanks, and the Kleiman Rule

Dan is absolutely right to distinguish between real think tanks and what I called “fake think tanks” (and what he calls, more generously, “advocacy tanks.”).  But what we need is some criterion for distinguishing the two: one key move of the modern Conservative Movement has been to dismiss all study as simply being the product …

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Think Tanks versus Advocacy Tanks

The mistake is viewing the Heritage Foundation as in some sense the counterpart of RAND, let alone the Harvard Economics Department — rather than being the pro-business counterpart of Sierra Club on environmental issues or of the AFL-CIO on labor issues.

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