Law Commons^™

Environmental Justice And Land Use Planning And Zoning, Patricia E. Salkin

Patricia E. Salkin

No abstract provided.

Seven Principles For Equitable Adaptation, Alice Kaswan

Alice Kaswan

Given the inevitability of serious climate impacts, climate change adaptation is becoming an urgent priority. Policy makers at the local, regional, state, and federal level are struggling to determine how to parlay existing authorities and develop new measures to avoid future calamity.

Successful adaptation will require not only attention to physical infrastructure, but to the underlying socioeconomic conditions that strongly determine the severity of climate impacts. Given the importance of underlying socioeconomic factors, this essay argues that equity should be a central feature of emerging domestic climate adaptation initiatives. It suggests seven principles for achieving equitable adaptation, principles designed to …

Environmental Justice And Environmental Law, Alice Kaswan

Alice Kaswan

This essay, prepared for the Fordham Environmental Law Review’s 20th Anniversary edition marking key developments in environmental law, addresses the past and future of environmental justice. From a historical perspective, it analyzes the central features of the environmental justice movement, its strengths and weaknesses in influencing environmental law, and the systemic reasons why environmental justice has struggled for influence in environmental policy. Looking forward, the essay focuses on how the environmental justice movement can contribute to the future of environmental law. Amplifying the voices of many environmental justice scholars, it argues that the environmental justice movement and its sister movement, …

Stasis And Change In Environmental Law, Gerald S. Dickinson

Gerald S. Dickinson

The past twenty years of environmental law are marked as much by legislative stasis as by profound change in the way that lawyers, policymakers, and scholars interact with the field. Although no new federal legislation was passed over the past two decades, much has changed about the field of environmental law. This change is the result of a set of conceptual and legal challenges to the field posed by intellectual and policy movements that took root in the early 1990s. The intellectual and policy movements that have most profoundly shaped the field of environmental law in the past twenty years …

Environmental Justice And International Environmental Law, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Carmen G. Gonzalez

Environmental justice lies at the heart of many environmental disputes between the global North and the global South as well as grassroots environmental struggles within nations. However, the discourse of international environmental law is often ahistorical and technocratic. It neither educates the North about its inordinate contribution to global environmental problems nor provides an adequate response to the concerns of nations and communities disproportionately burdened by poverty and environmental degradation. This article examines some of the root causes of environmental injustice among and within nations from the colonial period to the present, and discusses several strategies that can be used …