Providing a comprehensive overview of the current and developing state of environmental governance in the United States, this Advanced Introduction lays out the foundations of U.S. environmental law. E. Donald Elliott and Daniel C. Esty explore how federal environmental law is made and how it interacts with state law, highlighting the important role that administrative agencies play in the creation, implementation, and enforcement of U.S. environmental law.

Since 1970, when the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency was created, the primary means for addressing environmental problems in the U.S. has been through comprehensive federal statutes and detailed regulations. Evaluating almost three decades of experience with the Clean Air Act, Superfund, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other major federal environmental statutes, the contributors to this volume question the effectiveness and impact of the legal regime that created these regulations. While most studies of environmental policy paint a picture of improvement through government initiatives, these essays argue the contrary. Pointing to Cleveland's burning river, the death of Lake Erie, smog in Los Angeles, and Love Canal, the contributors demonstrate that command-and-control regulation of the environment has not delivered the great improvements in environmental quality as promised. The Common Law and the Environment offers principles for a new approach to protecting the environment and looks to evidence of the successes of alternative legal systems to address significant problems.

Legal regulation of the environment is often construed as a collection of legislated responses to the problems of modern living. Treated as such, 'environmental law' refers not to a body of distinctive juristic ideas (such as one might find in contract law or tort) but to a body of black-letter rules out of which a distinct jurisprudence might grow. This book challenges the accepted view by arguing that environmental law must be seen not as a mere instrument of social policy, but as a historical product of surprising antiquity and considerable sophistication. Environmental law, it is argued, is underpinned by a series of tenets concerning the relationship of human beings to the natural world, through the acquisition and use of property. By tracing these ideas to their roots in the political philosophy of the seventeenth century, and their reception into the early law of nuisance, this book seeks to overturn the perception that environmental law's philosophical significance is confined to questions about the extent to which a state should pursue collective well-being and public health through deliberate manipulation and restriction of private property rights. Through a close re-examination of both early and modern statutes and cases, this book concludes that, far from being intelligible in exclusively instrumental terms, environmental law must be understood as the product of sustained reflection upon fundamental moral questions concerning the relationship between property, rights and nature.

Law and Ecology: New Environmental Foundations contains a series of theoretical and applied perspectives on the connection between law and ecology, which together offer a radical and socially responsive foundation for environmental law. While its legal corpus grows daily, environmental law has not enjoyed the kind of jurisprudential underpinning generally found in other branches of law. This book forges a new ecological jurisprudential foundation for environmental law - where 'ecological' is understood both in the narrow sense of a more ecosystemic perspective on law, and in the broad sense of critical self-reflection of the mechanisms of environmental law as they operate in a context where boundaries between the human and the non-human are collapsing, and where the traditional distinction between ecocentrism and anthropocentrism is recast. Addressing current debates, including the intellectual property of bioresources; the protection of biodiversity in view of tribal land demands; the ethics of genetically modified organisms; the redefinition of the 'human' through feminist and technological research; the spatial/geographical boundaries of environmental jurisdiction; and the postcolonial geographies of pollution - Law and Ecology redefines the way environmental law is perceived, theorised and applied. It also constitutes a radical challenge to the traditionally human-centred frameworks and concerns of legal theory.