Law Commons^™

Environmental Law As A Legal Field: An Inquiry In Legal Taxonomy, Todd S. Aagaard

Working Paper Series

This Article examines the classification of the law into legal fields, first generally and then by specific examination of the field of environmental law. We classify the law into fields to find and to create patterns, which render the law coherent and understandable. A legal field is a group of situations unified by a pattern or set of patterns that is both common and distinctive to the field. We can conceptualize a legal field as the interaction of four underlying constitutive dimensions of the field: (1) a factual context that gives rise to (2) certain policy tradeoffs, which are in …

Strategic Idealizations Of Science To Oppose Environmenal Regulation: A Case Study Of Five Tmdl Controversies, David S. Caudill, Donald E. Curley

Working Paper Series

Proponents of environmental regulation have catalogued various strategies used by takeholders to delay or weaken regulatory efforts, including (1) manufacturing or magnifying uncertainty; (2) demanding “sound science” (and thereby imposing unreasonable standards of evidence); and (3) data quality initiatives that permit deconstruction of credible studies by highlighting inevitable assumptions, funding sources, and areas for further research. Such strategies can be termed “idealizations” of science insofar as they rely on an unrealistic image of good science as somehow capable of avoiding tentative conclusions, institutional interests, consensual assumptions, and the need for further research.

The question remains, however, when does an argument …