Blog

I’ll say this up front: I love rockets. So you’d think I would welcome the announcement that SpaceX plans to build the world’s largest spaceport on the Louisiana coast, less than a three-hour drive from my house. I want to love this idea. But I don’t.

At the 2026 Law & Society Annual Conference, I participated in a roundtable discussion about Teaching Environmental Law in Context — both the new book by Member Scholars Carmen Gonzalez and Rebecca Bratspies and the activity of teaching environmental law to law students in tumultuous times for the field. I have taught environmental law at the University of Kansas School of Law for all but two of the last 15 years, and I have never taught it in exactly the same way twice. I’m always adjusting my approach — adding the most current events, looking for new ways to teach the wide range of complex topics to help students build skills, and supporting students to understand both the environmental law statutes and the pollution problems they are designed to address. In short, a book like this — with its focus on creative and impactful ways to reach students in the dense field of environmental law — is my kind of book.

If the role of the environmental justice scholar, as the venerable Robert Bullard contends, is to support environmental justice communities, then the responsibility of the environmental law classroom is to develop legal scaffolding to protect ecologies and inhabitants. Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez’s Teaching Environmental Law in Context succeeds as an indispensable reference and support tool for classrooms and others seeking a deeper understanding of environmental protection, law, and policy. Within the book’s immersive take on a suite of pressing environmental issues, the Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) chapter stands out for its methodical approach to framing quantitative aspects of environmental decision-making.

Teaching environmental law has always been hard. The problem is, it’s about things our students care about. It’s about what Exxon knew, and the BP oil spill, and birds soaked with oil, and little kids with asthma or lead poisoning or cancer because wealthy people in corporate boardrooms were indifferent to the suffering of Black and Brown communities. It’s about Native Americans marching in protest to protect sacred lands their ancestors have stewarded and protected for millennia. I suppose this varies by region, but here in north Philadelphia, students come into class energized, outraged, and ready to defend the powerless and speak truth to power.

My book with fellow Member Scholar Rebecca Bratspies was inspired by an article written by former UN Special Rapporteur (and Member Scholar) John Knox (and co-author Nicole Tronolone) evaluating U.S. environmental law through the framework of international human rights law. With several noteworthy exceptions (such as climate change), Knox and Tronolone concluded that the U.S. (at the end of the Biden administration) generally complied with the substantive and procedural requirements of the right to a healthy environment. However, they described the government’s failure to address environmental injustice as nothing short of “catastrophic.” Far from remedying these shortcomings, the current administration is reinforcing them, as regulatory rollbacks proliferate, equity-based initiatives are dismantled, and coordinated political campaigns seek to ban the teaching of "divisive concepts" such as climate change and racial justice.

Teaching right now is no joke! This is especially true of teaching environmental law. Most of us teaching in this area have dedicated our professional lives to protecting the environment — the air, the water, the land, and of course the people who breathe that air, drink that water, and live on that land. Each day is more painful than the last as our work is dismantled in front of our eyes. Institutions that seemed solid bulwarks against tyranny are crumbling into dust. In this moment of crisis, fellow Member Scholar Carmen Gonzalez and I set out to write a book for our fellow professors struggling to find their feet — consider Teaching Environmental Law in Context a kind of love letter to the better world we are convinced we can build together with our students.

It’s August here in western Washington State, which means two things: (1) I’ll soon be packing up for my return to New Orleans (class starts soon), and (2) the smoke blowing in from regional wildfires is making my nose burn. Appropriately, the news here is full of stories about personal loss, evacuation routes, fire-suppression strategies, and the brave firefighters who put their lives on the line to keep us safe. But there’s a deeper story: Our broad approach to handling wildfire in the United States was designed for a climate that no longer exists. We must do better.

It is tempting to think that the threat of the current Congress abusing the Congressional Review Act (CRA) is over, now that the deadline to revisit rules implemented during the previous Congress’s session—provided by the CRA’s unique “lookback provision”—has formally passed. But that would be a mistake, as conservative lawmakers have found novel ways to target agency actions from previous administrations.

The Trump administration recently repealed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 endangerment finding—the scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare that has anchored federal climate regulation for nearly two decades. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin called the finding “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach.” Within weeks, a coalition of more than 20 states filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse the repeal. The legal battle that follows will help define American environmental policy for a generation. Brigham Daniels and I did not plan the timing of our new book, Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law, to coincide with this particular legal conflict. But we could not have chosen a more clarifying moment for its release. The endangerment finding repeal is not an aberration—it is a recognizable recurrence in a history that stretches back centuries. Law has always been the primary engine of both environmental exploitation and protection in the United States.