The Environment

Abstract

This article discusses three strands of environmental law scholarship. First, the nearly simultaneous passage of the major environmental laws meant that legislators often had no time to react to the experience under one law before enacting another; thus several mistakes were made in the early environmental laws, and many of these mistakes were repeated from one statute to the next. A large strand of legal scholarship on the environment has taken critical aim at these early mistakes. To this day, environmental law scholars focus much of their attention on issues of statutory design. Secondly, environmental law came of age during a period of great flux in the relationships between the legislature, the executive, and the courts. Finally, environmental law has come of age during a period in which opinions about ‘vertical’ institutional design — what in the United States comes under the umbrella of ‘federalism’ and what in the European Union comes under the umbrella of ‘subsidiarity’ — have changed quite substantially.