This post is part of a series related to Teaching Environmental Law in Context, a recent book by Member Scholars Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez.
As a (hopefully) conscientious law professor, I have always given lots of thought to teaching. How do I explain content to students? How do I keep them interested? How do I provide what they need to know to be good attorneys and good people?
I firmly believe that being a good law professor also requires deep scholarship and research, but I have always connected that to the teaching enterprise, as well. But law professors (for the most part) are not really trained in teaching pedagogy, and so most of us began our approach to teaching by attempting to replicate how we were taught when we were in law school.
In some cases, we have marvelous antecedents (I am the luckiest to have had Carol Rose as a professor in more than one environmental law class), and now some law schools themselves try to provide some “on the job” teacher training to law professors. But even so, when a professor hits the ground running, we often don’t have the time (or take enough time) to really think about the teaching enterprise, and particularly how it may vary depending upon the subject matter.
For instance, I got comfortable with teaching torts many years ago. I know how to transfer the content, and apparently I (or the juicy cases) keep it interesting. I will often change and update the content and even re-examine teaching methods for torts in general, but it has never felt difficult for that particular topic. Similarly, despite its bad rep in law schools, I have been able to keep the students nicely engaged with administrative law. It has always been much more difficult with environmental law.
I don’t know how many times I have had the conversation with other environmental law professors about how difficult it seems to be to teach the subject, despite the “sexy” subject matter. The usual talking point is that students come to environmental law anxious to save the world, but instead we tell them to save the PDF file of the latest National Ambient Air Quality Standard rulemaking, whose hundreds of pages they can then pore over in the next week. Oh, I try to still make it as interesting as I can by trying to ground it in something they may be familiar with (“Remember that awful wildfire smoke this summer!?”), but I have also felt the responsibility to show them what the “real practice” of environmental law is like (“You need to know how to challenge a rulemaking legally!”).
But the truth is, the actual world of torts (texting while driving is never a good idea) and even administrative law (why did grandma not get her Social Security payment on time?) are much more salient to the everyday experience of most people (including our students) than whether or not a power plant exceeds its 12-hour parts per billion threshold for small particulates.
This disconnect really came to a head at the dawn of the second Trump administration as “normal legal practice” as we know it was (and still is) under attack. Prompted by my own curiosity and need to understand how to deal with a federal executive branch gone haywire, I decided to radically rethink my own approach to environmental law, grounding almost all of it in the actual news of the day. How do you get the construction of the offshore wind farm started again if your client is the state of New York that is depending on that power in the future? What court do you go to? What do you ask for? What do you need to know? And guess what? The class didn’t fall apart. We had less time on the proposed rulemakings, but we still got there, and got there in a way that was connected to stuff they really cared about.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one thinking more deeply about the environmental law teaching problem. Thanks to Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez, now we can all have a resource that solves the problem of grounding environmental law into lived experiences — things that really matter to students. And this is a thorough, well thought out, and replicable method for bringing in the “real” that doesn’t depend on (hopefully) temporally limited disruptions in the executive branch.
Teaching Environmental Law in Context (Elgar, 2026) is a magnificent teaching primer and needed companion to our traditional environmental law classes. It follows the historic teaching canon (the big statutes and how they work), but it also provides background and insights that make each of these statutes real. The book reminds us of why they matter. And that, in turn, is the way to tell students that environmental law and what they can do in it also matter. There are questions that center the issues up front, and resources and exercises that can bring all of this to life.
I am so looking forward to being able to use this in my next environmental law class. We can save the world after all!
