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What is environmental law?

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Environmental law includes statutes and regulation for pollution control, conservation of natural resources, safety of manufac­tured chemicals, safety of the drinking water supply, and regu­lation of the energy industry. In addition to this large body of statutes and regulations in the United States, there are also more than 1,000 international treaties and multi-national agreements relating to environmental concerns. Finally, environmental law includes a large component of administrative law (e.g., the body of law governing the regulatory agencies that promulgate and enforce environmental regulations) and Constitutional law (e.g., standing for lawsuits, Takings Clause jurisprudence, etc.).

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What are the major sources of environmental law?

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Nearly all environmental law courses focus on a small set of major federal statutes: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA, or Superfund), the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). There are other environmental statutes, but these are the seven that typically have entire chapters devoted to them in casebooks. Most law school courses also include a brief discussion of Common Law Nuisance and Trespass, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), and relevant sections of Constitutional law.

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ENVIRONMENTAL LAW—STATE vs. FEDERAL LAW

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Every state has its own body of environmental statutes and regulations, which work in tandem with federal environmental laws. Environmental law practitioners, therefore, must deal with both state and federal laws. The state laws, however, are usually adapted directly from their federal counterparts in fact, many federal environmental statutes require states to enact state-specific components and implementation plans. For this reason, the federal environmental statutes receive the most attention in law school courses

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POLICY METHODS IN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

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Environmental policy does not always take the form of command­and-control regulations or enforcement. Government agencies also use a number of "market-based incentives," such as tradable pollution rights, licensing and permit fees, compliance "offsets," and direct corporate subsidies. Private litigation—in the form of tort actions for nuisance, property actions for trespass, or "citizen suits" against polluters—also influences the decisions of potential polluters. Finally, many environmental statutes rely heavily on reporting requirements and information disclosure, which brings public pressure on potential polluters to consider the environmental consequences of their actions. E Ch. 1-I.

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BASIC ECONOMIC CONCEPTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

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Two basic concepts from the field of economics permeate the cases and legislation in the field of environmental law: exter­nalities and cost-benefit analysis. Externalities are costs that parties impose on others who are innocent bystanders—that is, they have not agreed beforehand to endure the deleterious effects that result from the activities in question. Cost-benefit analysis means analyzing whether a particular regulation is worthwhile; some regulations impose enormous burdens on commerce and infringe on private property rights without pro­ducing a corresponding benefit to the environment (number of lives saved, etc.).