Environmental problems are never only scientific or technical problems. They are also legal and political questions about power, responsibility, value, and harm. This course introduces students to environmental law and policy as evolving frameworks through which societies define environmental injury, assign accountability, and imagine obligations to human and nonhuman life.
Working across U.S., comparative, and international contexts, we will ask several core questions: Who or what counts as a legal subject? How do regulatory systems address pollution whose causes and effects cross borders? What roles do corporations, states, courts, and social movements play in environmental governance? Can law respond adequately to ecological crisis, or does it reproduce the same forms of inequality and extractive logic that generated the crisis in the first place?
Working across U.S., comparative, and international contexts, we will ask several core questions: Who or what counts as a legal subject? How do regulatory systems address pollution whose causes and effects cross borders? What roles do corporations, states, courts, and social movements play in environmental governance? Can law respond adequately to ecological crisis, or does it reproduce the same forms of inequality and extractive logic that generated the crisis in the first place?
- Profesor: Jessica Croteau