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Full-Text Articles in Law

Our Rights And Obligations To Future Generations For The Environment, Edith Brown Weiss Jan 1990

Our Rights And Obligations To Future Generations For The Environment, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We read every day about the desecration of our environment and the mismanagement of our natural resources. We have always had the capacity to wreck the environment on a small or even regional scale. Centuries of irrigation without adequate drainage in ancient times converted large areas of the fertile Tigris-Euphrates valley into barren desert. What is new is that we now have the power to change our global environment irreversibly, with profoundly damaging effects on the robustness and integrity of the planet and the heritage that we pass to future generations.


Green Property, J. Peter Byrne Jan 1990

Green Property, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay begins an effort to imagine legal principles that further ecological values and to criticize extant principles that embody the antithetical values of exploitation and consumption. I will focus on the transformation of property law inherent in adopting an environmentally sustainable land use program.


The Planetary Trust: Conservation And Intergenerational Equity, Edith Brown Weiss Jan 1984

The Planetary Trust: Conservation And Intergenerational Equity, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article suggests a normative framework which, if adopted and internalized by our political, economic, and social institutions, might enable them to serve as vehicles for ensuring that future generations will inherit their just share of our global heritage. Its thesis is that the human species holds the natural and cultural resources of the planet in trust for all generations of the human species. The article focuses on our duty towards the human species, for it is on this fiduciary duty that law and political institutions can be brought most readily to bear. This planetary trust obligates each generation to …