This landmark book unveils the history of defending Australia's natural environment and examines the subject's legal and political contexts from the birth of the nation in 1901 until the advent of the so-called modern era of environmental regulation in the late 1960s. It rejects the mythology that Australia lacked environmental law before the late 1960s in revealing how many of today's environmental laws, from pollution control to nature conservation, emerged from precedents or events much earlier in the 20th century. This history however reveals a discrepancy between lawmakers' greater efficacy to exploit rather than protect the environment, a discrepancy that grew as nature's backlash intensified in a rapidly degrading continent colonised to build the Australian nation. In exploring these dynamics, the book offers a rich tapestry of case studies illustrated with historic photographs that show the origins of Australia's environmental laws and how they borrowed from international precedents or furnished lessons for other nations. Through its multi-disciplinary enquiry, the book offers scholars and students of environmental law, legal history and the environmental humanities a unique story about the failures and successes in the making of environmental law.

Most Americans--even environmentalists--date the emergence of laws protecting nature to the early 1970s. But Karl Boyd Brooks shows that, far from being a product of that activist decade, American environmental law emerged well before the first Earth Day, often in unexpected places far from Capitol Hill. Surveying the landscape from the end of World War II to Earth Day 1970, Brooks traces a dramatic shift in Americans' relationship to the environment and the emergence of new environmental statutes. He takes readers into legislative hearing rooms, lawyers' conferences, and administrators' offices to describe how Americans forged a new body of law that reflected their hopes for rescuing the land from air pollution, deforestation, and other potential threats. For while previous law had treated nature as a commodity, more and more Americans had come to see it as a national treasure worth preserving. Brooks explores the way key features of the New Deal's legal legacy influenced environmental law. This path-breaking environmental history examines how cultural, intellectual, and economic changes in postwar America brought about new solutions to environmental problems that threatened public health and degraded natural aesthetics. Visiting riverbanks and freeways, duck blinds and airsheds, Before Earth Day reveals the new strategies and efforts by which the unceasing process of legal change created environmental law. And through real-world examples-how Los Angelenos pressed cases about water and air quality, how an Idaho lawyer helped clients pursue new environmental regulations, how citizens challenged government and corporate plans to dam rivers-Brooks demonstrates that key changes in property, procedure, contract, and other legal rules in those early years stimulated the national environmental laws to come. Gracefully written and meticulously researched, Brooks's work dramatically updates our understanding of the origins of environmental law. By taking the postwar years more seriously, he shows that earlier actions across the country played a central role in shaping the structure and goals of well-known federal laws passed during the "environmental decade" of the seventies. Before Earth Day describes nothing less than an entirely new way of thinking, as environmental law emerged from local jurisdictions to reshape national agendas, firing the popular imagination and only then remodeling law school curricula. A long-needed corrective to standard political and legal history, it demonstrates both the longstanding environmental concerns of Americans and the resilience of law.

The study of water pollution control regulation is a study of statutes and their administration. This casebook explores water pollution and the federal statute chiefly designed to control it, the Clean Water Act, and examines how water pollution is addressed, first by the common law and then by statute. An introduction provides the student with an understanding of what constitutes water pollution, where it originates, and how it can be controlled. These materials were originally designed for the introductory course in environmental regulation/environmental law at Pace Law School. A Teachers Manual includes exercises that teach students advanced legal research, familiarity with administrative law mechanisms, and the ability to integrate what they have learned about the Clean Water Act.

Dispels the conventional belief that American environmental law was a product of the 1970s, finding instead that its origins go back to New Deal and Cold War policies, and traces the dramatic post-war shift in the way Americans viewed the natural environment.

The unprecedented expansion in environmental regulation over the past thirty years—at all levels of government—signifies a transformation of our nation's laws that is both palpable and encouraging. Environmental laws now affect almost everything we do, from the cars we drive and the places we live to the air we breathe and the water we drink. But while enormous strides have been made since the 1970s, gaps in the coverage, implementation, and enforcement of the existing laws still leave much work to be done. In The Making of Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus offers a new interpretation of the past three decades of this area of the law, examining the legal, political, cultural, and scientific factors that have shaped—and sometimes hindered—the creation of pollution controls and natural resource management laws. He argues that in the future, environmental law must forge a more nuanced understanding of the uncertainties and trade-offs, as well as the better-organized political opposition that currently dominates the federal government. Lazarus is especially well equipped to tell this story, given his active involvement in many of the most significant moments in the history of environmental law as a litigator for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, an assistant to the Solicitor General, and a member of advisory boards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Ranging widely in his analysis, Lazarus not only explains why modern environmental law emerged when it did and how it has evolved, but also points to the ambiguities in our current situation. As the field of environmental law "grays" with middle age, Lazarus's discussions of its history, the lessons learned from past legal reforms, and the challenges facing future lawmakers are both timely and invigorating.

This book sheds light on the latest trends in environmental law by analyzing some of the main sectors of law, including administrative law, constitutional law, EU law, US Law, and human rights law. It explores the evolution of these sectors before courts and tribunals from a US-EU perspective and from the perspectives of some of the foremost academics and justices from the major jurisdictions. Supranational and national courts, both in Europe and in the US, have delivered significant environmental judgements in recent years. The corresponding case law reflects how, in many jurisdictions, environmental and climate litigation continues to expand exponentially as a tool to strengthen environmental protection, whether by pushing national governments to be more ambitious or by enforcing existing statutes and regulations. Courts, particularly after the Paris Agreement, are increasingly seeking their own role as an important player in multilevel environmental governance. Courts in both the US and EU are at the forefront of this process and their role in shaping environmental rule of law will be fundamental in the near future.

Written by leading scholars and experts with extensive practice and teaching experience in the field, Comparative and Global Environmental Law and Policy offers a student-friendly approach to the study of a rapidly evolving and important area of law. Its multi-jurisdictional selection of judicial opinions and legal materials introduces students to the worldwide reach of environmental law. Through its substance, the book familiarizes students not only with governing and emerging legal principles but also demonstrates how legal norms are applied to specific issues and contexts, illustrating how law-on-the-books becomes law-in-action. Student understanding is reinforced by problem exercises and discussion questions. Professors and students will benefit from: A multi-jurisdictional selection of environmental law cases and regulatory materials from across the world, with many cases from the developing world and emerging economies. Separate chapters on rapidly evolving and critical topics such as rights of nature, sustainability, corporations and private environmental governance, human rights and the environment, and climate change. Presentation of basic background principles of environmental law, institutions, and governance and their operation in international, national and subnational systems, including indigenous governance systems. Emphasis across the book on issues of institutions and governance as well as enforcement and effectiveness. Judicial opinions providing an authoritative articulation of how legal principles are applied in various systems. Numerous problem exercises and discussion questions to introduce topics and reinforce concepts and materials. Integrated perspective on the relationship of international and transnational environmental law, national environmental law, environmental norms and principles in other settings such as in private environmental governance, and governance institutions.

A renowned Supreme Court advocate tells the inside story of Massachusetts v. EPA, the landmark case that made it possible for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gasses--from the Bush administration's fierce opposition, to the internecine conflicts among the petitioners, to the razor-thin 5-4 victory.

Environmental law is the law concerned with environmental problems. It is a vast area of law that operates from the local to the global, involving a range of different legal and regulatory techniques. In theory, environmental protection is a no brainer. Few people would actively argue for pollution or environmental destruction. Ensuring a clean environment is ethically desirable, and also sensible from a purely self-interested perspective. Yet, in practice, environmental law is a messy and complex business fraught with conflict. Whilst environmental law is often characterized in overly simplistic terms, with a law being seen as be a magic wand that solves an environmental problem, the reality is that creating and maintaining a body of laws to address and avoid problems is not easy, and involves legislators, courts, regulators and communities. This Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the main features of environmental law, and discusses how environmental law deals with multiple interests, socio-political conflicts, and the limits of knowledge about the environment. Showing how interdependent societies across the world have developed robust and legitimate bodies of law to address environmental problems, Elizabeth Fisher discusses some of the major issues involved in environmental law's: nation statehood, power, the reframing role of law, the need to ensure real environmental improvements, and environmental justice. As Fisher explains, environmental law is, and will always be, necessary but inherently controversial. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.