This two-part post is part of a series related to Teaching Environmental Law in Context, a recent book by Member Scholars Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez.
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.
And then we hit them with it: no-observable-effects levels, dose-response curves, best systems of emissions reduction adequately demonstrated, and lowest achievable emissions rates. We plunge them into long, complicated U.S. Supreme Court cases that go on and on about things that seem to have no relation whatsoever to what really matters. We explain earnestly and with a straight face that whether a wetland should be protected turns not on the invaluable ecosystem services it delivers, but on whether it has a continuous surface connection to something called a navigable-in-fact waterway, which turns on whether somebody could have driven their boat through it in the nineteenth century.
And the acronyms! Oh the acronyms! Students find themselves drowning in an alphabet soup of mind-numbing, soul-crushing acronyms.
Add to that the historical confluence of horribles we currently find ourselves living through, when all of us in legal education, no matter the subject, are struggling to figure out how to pick ourselves up from a puddle of despair every morning to teach our students about a thing that increasingly looks like a mythical creature from another place and time — “the rule of law.” And when every day, there’s a firehose of new information coming at us about the latest round of rollbacks, rescissions, and chain saw massacres that we need to digest and absorb in order to stay one step ahead of our students’ questions and convey to them the gravity and magnitude of all the destruction being wrought by this administration.
For me personally, add the fact that — for better or worse, and at the urging of my students, who are apparently thirsty for this — I agreed to teach environmental law as a 1L elective next year, and I am wondering how in the world I’m going to teach it in a way that doesn’t send them running screaming in the other direction.
Under the weight of all of that, one might well ask, “What is a poor environmental law professor to do?”
Well, earlier this year, not a moment too soon and just when I was about to fall into a pit of despair, along to the rescue came my two fairy godmothers — my dear old friend and law school classmate, Rebecca Bratspies, and the wonderful Carmen Gonzalez — with this amazing new book, Teaching Environmental Law in Context (Elgar, 2026).
As I cracked it open and began to read, I found myself exclaiming: “Where have you been all my life?” I should clarify that the first time I taught a course in environmental law, the second or third session had to be canceled because two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. So, I’ve been teaching the course for a while, and my biggest complaint about this book is that Carmen and Rebecca didn’t think to publish it 25 years ago.
First, it is amazingly concise. Each chapter is like a haiku poem. It distills a given statute or topic down to ten or, at most, fifteen pages.
And unlike every casebook I’ve ever read, these chapters tell you what you actually want to know. They start with the problem, including some fascinating historical materials I hadn’t seen before. (Consider, for example, their suggestion that we give our students a glimpse of what uncontrolled industrial pollution looked like in an age before environmental statutes by showing them an excerpt from The City, a film produced by the American Institute of Planners for the 1939 World’s Fair with a script by Lewis Mumford and a score by Aaron Copeland. See minutes 7:19 – 9:05.)
Then they talk about how the statute deals with that problem. But they don’t explain it from the perspective of some industrial operator applying for a permit, or around the particular narrow technical topics that just happen to have been addressed by appellate courts. They explain from a place our students are far more likely to be — from the vantage point of social justice. They describe how the statute goes about protecting the public and the degree to which it has failed or succeeded in doing that and doing it equitably.
In Part 2 of my post, I’ll explore some specific teaching examples from Rebecca and Carmen’s book, including laws like the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
