Environmental Law Commons^™

The Mysterious Power Of Land Use Law: Constructing A Framework Law For Climate Resilient Development, John R. Nolon, Maureen Hartwell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article introduces and explains Climate Resilient Development (CRD), which is relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a primary method of managing climate change. CRD "integrates adaptation measures and their enabling conditions with mitigation to advance sustainable development for all." 1 CRD illuminates the close relationship between adaptive and mitigative development and land use law, particularly the authority delegated to local governments to regulate and incentivize private land development and conservation. The Article unveils a legal structure that is followed in most states to organize local laws that affect land development; as such, it facilitates …

Methane Removal Under The Paris Agreement, Romany M. Webb

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, the international community agreed to “strengthen the global response to climate change” by limiting the “increase in global average temperatures to well below" 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and ideally to 1.5 degrees Celsius. As recognized in the Agreement, to stay within these limits, global greenhouse gas emissions must be rapidly reduced, “so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century” — a situation commonly described as “net zero.” The need to reach net zero has prompted growing …

Varied Legal Parameters Shape Fiduciaries’ Ability To Act On Climate Risk, Cynthia Hanawalt, Andy Fitch

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Commentators who advocate either for or against corporate and asset managers addressing climate risks often refer to “fiduciary duty” as justification for their claims. Yet no field of corporate or asset management actually imposes one standalone fiduciary duty. Nor do any two business-law fields impose the same fiduciary regime. Instead, these fields adopt differing arrays of fiduciary duties to address various types of relationships, comprising a different blend of affirmative obligations and/or prohibitions, assessed with different degrees of strictness by enforcers and courts. As a result, overgeneralizations about fiduciaries’ duty in all business-law contexts tend to further obscure what a …

What Is The Distribution Of National Historical Parks?, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

In an increasingly polarized nation, which no longer can reach any consensus about what is meant by the term “common good,” it might be wise to extend additional protections to national monuments from executive branch interference. But prior to doing so, the U.S. Congress may want to undertake some additional research work. Such research could build on the existing charge of the National Park Service as well as other interested parties. By doing so, Congress gains insight into whether and how this federal legislature should expand protections for national historical parks.

My article explains, at least in part, how Congress …

Sabin Center For Climate Change Law Annual Report 2024-2025, Tiffany Challe

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This 2024-2025 annual report highlights the Sabin Center’s breadth and impact across our program areas, including climate litigation, carbon management and negative emissions technologies, US climate policy, energy transition, climate law and finance.

Heat Camps: Juvenile Curfews, Extreme Heat & The Eighth Amendment, Norrinda Brown

Washington and Lee Law Review

For decades, in the summertime, America has confined certain of its youth in what are essentially open-air heat camps. In city after city, camp-form is established through the enactment of warm-weather juvenile curfews which keep the youth at home or in state-sponsored centers during summer nights and, increasingly, during days as well. Local governments justify these curfews with general notions of “public safety,” including to protect the youth they confine. But the laws are not benevolent. Reducing youth mobility by curfew results in exclusion, oversurveillance, and potentially lethal heat punishment of the youth, possibly in violation of the Eighth Amendment. …

The Children’S Lawsuits: Building A Global Movement In Law And Society, Mary Christina Wood

Washington and Lee Law Review

This essay describes the Atmospheric Trust Litigation (ATL) campaign, spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust, consisting of climate cases brought by youth premised on the public trust principle and, later, on express constitutional rights. The essay characterizes the cases as (1) accomplishing a “rights turn” in environmental law by invoking constitutional claims rather than statutory claims that previously marked almost all environmental litigation; (2) establishing a unified global framework of climate responsibility by depicting the planet’s atmosphere as a global public trust asset which all governments have an obligation to protect; and (3) galvanizing a youth climate movement centered on the …

Child/Youth Climate Litigation: Tracking Children’S Rights And Children’S Impact, Aoife Daly, Liesl Muller

Washington and Lee Law Review

Children and youth have been engaging extensively in climate action around the world. They have been doing this by protesting in the streets, talking with governments, and most recently by taking climate litigation against governments and companies. In this Article, these climate cases are considered from a children’s rights perspective. Using the Youth Climate Justice database, fifty cases are analyzed to consider two aspects of climate litigation—the children’s rights involved in the case, and the significance of the outcomes of the cases. It is concluded that climate cases are a new form of child participation in society, and that child …

Foreword: Children And Constitutions In The Anthropocene Era, Catherine Smith

Washington and Lee Law Review

In Spring 2025, the Washington and Lee Law Review held its Lara D. Gass Symposium, Children and Constitutions in the Anthropocene Era. It consisted of a keynote address by Julia Olson, Co-Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel of Our Children’s Trust, and three panels: “Children, Climate Change, and State Constitutions”; “The U.S. Constitutions and the Meaning of ‘We the [Young] People’”; and “Youth-Powered Litigation and Global Constitutionalism.” The heavily attended Symposium was a tour-de-force in the field of children’s rights.

As climate chaos mounts, young people around the world are pressing courts to reconceptualize the meaning of liberty, equality, and …

Earth Day 2025: Albuquerque, Nm, Clifford Villa

Faculty Scholarship

This Earth Day 2025, I was at home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I was born and raised, where we measure time in family generations. For too long, I’ve been away. But returning home, I have new perspectives—and new technology. You may laugh, but I’ve discovered Merlin.

“Small” Voices, Big Wins: Analyzing Remedies In Children’S Climate Cases, Maria Antonia Tigre

Washington and Lee Law Review

Children’s climate litigation has emerged as a powerful tool to address the climate crisis, with young plaintiffs around the world taking governments and corporations to court to demand climate action. This Article examines successful cases—those in which relief sought by the applicants was fully or partially granted—across five continents, providing an “around the world” perspective on the evolution and impact of youth-led climate litigation. Focusing on landmark cases in Australia, Colombia, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States, this analysis highlights the arguments presented by young plaintiffs and the judicial reasoning that supported the relief granted. Through a comparative …

The Moral Boundary Of The Firm, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Jane E. Miller, Margaret Blair, Jonathan M. Gilligan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Scholars have wrestled with the legal boundary of the firm for generations. The legal boundary limits the extent to which a firm can be held liable for the torts, contractual, and regulatory obligations of other corporations. The existence of a legal boundary suggests that the law limits incentives for firms to control the climate and other environmental harms caused by their corporate suppliers. Yet recent research demonstrates that many of the largest corporations impose environmental requirements on their suppliers that exceed the legal requirements imposed on these suppliers. This suggests that some factors other than the threat of liability may …

Improving Distributional Analysis In Regulatory Evaluation: An Assessment Of The 2023 Circular A-4, W. Kip Viscusi, A. Fraas, John D. Graham, Kerry Krutilla, Randall Lutter, Jason F. Shogren

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The November 2023 revision to OMB Circular A-4 expands upon past guidance on distributional assessment in regulatory impact analysis and adds new options for conducting it, such as the use of distributional weights based on the marginal utility of income. This note explores the implications of key changes suggested in the 2023 guidelines and addresses modeling and data challenges that could yield recommendations for future revisions. We suggest that progress in improving distributional assessment in regulatory impact analysis is most likely if federal agencies collaborate with the National Science Foundation to produce model distributional analyses for different types of regulations.

Analysis Of Environmental Law Scholarship 2023-2024, Michael P. Vandenbergh, Chloe C. Allen, Linda K. Breggin, Sydney C. Schoonover

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of some of the most creative and feasible environmental law and policy proposals from the legal academic literature each year. The articles that are considered include all environmental law articles published in select law journals during the previous academic year. The law journal articles that are republished and discussed are selected by Vanderbilt University Law School students with input from their course instructors and an …

Annual Review Of Seqra Cases And Developments, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) turns 50 this year. The statute has changed only a little in the last half century, but it continues to be a font of litigation. The courts decided 43 cases under SEQRA in 2024.

Implementation of SEQRA is also raising policy issues. The legislature is considering whether to amend SEQRA to speed up affordable housing projects, and the State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is drafting regulations concerning the role SEQRA should play in advancing environmental justice.

A constant theme is the tension between thoroughly studying important project impacts and involving …

The Potential And Perils Of Financializing Climate Risk Governance: Insights For Urban Policymakers, Emma Colven, Madison Condon, Kelly Hereid, Savannah Cox

Faculty Scholarship

In this roundtable discussion, Savannah Cox speaks with three experts about the financialization of climate risk governance: Kelly Hereid, a climate scientist at Liberty Mutual, Madison Condon, an associate professor at Boston University School of Law, and Emma Colven, a lecturer in risk, environment, and society at King’s College London. In this conversation that ranges from Miami to Jakarta, Savannah, Kelly, Madison, and Emma discuss the legal, political, and technical challenges relating to financialized climate risk governance: on one hand, the rise of insurance companies and rating agencies as de facto “risk assessors” and, on the other hand, the proliferation …

Liquid Power: Myths, Realities, And Policy Responses To Wall Street's Takeover Of Water Markets, Vanessa Casado-Pérez

Faculty Scholarship

In Don Quixote, there is a moment when all the knightly novels are thrown into the fire for their fantastical depictions of chivalry. Yet one book is spared: Tirant lo Blanc. It is saved because, unlike the others, it portrays knights who die in their beds-offering a more realistic depiction of medieval battles. Similarly, Liquid Asset stands out as the book that should be preserved from the extensive body of scholarship on water markets. Many works in this field are influenced by ideological biases that shape their analyses. In contrast, Buzz Thompson's books provides the nuance and balance often lacking …

Editors And Staff Members

Public Land & Resources Law Review

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

Public Land & Resources Law Review

No abstract provided.

Letter From The Editors

Public Land & Resources Law Review

No abstract provided.