Volume 32, Number 2

Articles

Empowerment, Fairness, Integration: South African Answers to the Question of Constitutional Environmental Rights

Eric C. Christiansen, Golden Gate University School of Law
echristiansen@ggu.edu

We live in an era of increasing awareness of the pressing claims of environmentalism. We are more mindful of the risk of environmental degradation and more acutely aware of the human role in it than in any previous era. Additionally, the late twentieth century and recent decades have seen an explosive growth in the number of new constitutions, many with expansive and relatively novel rights protections. These modern developments typify a period of assertive constitutionalism and a relative confidence that constitutions can solve problems that ordinary politics can or will not. Read more about Empowerment, Fairness, Integration: South African Answers to the Question of Constitutional Environmental Rights

  • June 2013
  • 32 Stan.Envtl.L.J. 215
  • Article

Hitching Our Wagon to a Dim Star: Why Outmoded Water Codes and "Public Interest" Review Cannot Protect the Public Trust in Western Water Law

Michelle Bryan Mudd, University of Montana School of Law
michelle.bryanmudd@umontana.edu

Scholars have called the public trust’s expansion into water rights the “most significant expansion of public trust principles” in the past few decades. Considering that this doctrinal expansion has been so legally significant, the lack of change in state water codes is both remarkable and troubling. Of particular concern is the largely unnoted trend of equating the public trust with the public interest, which opens the door to the use of politically driven public interest provisions in state water codes. Read more about Hitching Our Wagon to a Dim Star: Why Outmoded Water Codes and "Public Interest" Review Cannot Protect the Public Trust in Western Water Law

  • June 2013
  • 32 Stan.Envtl.L.J. 283
  • Article

Building Blocks for Global Climate Protection

Richard B. Stewart, New York University School of Law
richard.stewart@nyu.edu
Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton University
omichael@princeton.edu
Bryce Rudyk, New York University School of Law
bryce.rudyk@nyu.edu

This article presents an innovative institutional approach to supplement and ultimately strengthen the lagging United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process for negotiating a climate treaty that commits major emitting and developed countries to greenhouse gas emissions limitations. The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action does not aim to have such a treaty before 2020, and there remain very serious obstacles to reaching such an agreement even then. In the interim, the only international global climate regulation in force is a substantially weakened Kyoto Protocol. Read more about Building Blocks for Global Climate Protection

  • June 2013
  • 32 Stan.Envtl.L.J. 341
  • Article