Environmental

Environmental Courses

Environmental Justice

This course addresses environmental justice as a legal and social concern. Using case studies, academic literature, and other materials, we will engage with the history of environmental injustices inflicted upon traditionally disenfranchised communities and the rise of the environmental justice movement in response. In doing so, we examine the legal and social tools with which the environmental justice movement operates, and the barriers to achieving environmental justice.

Administrative Law Research

The course introduces students to effective legal research techniques used to find the law of federal and state agencies. This course provides students with practical, hands-on experience with legal resources and research tools. This course emphasizes building the practical research skills required to succeed in an increasingly complex legal and regulatory environment.

Florida Environmental Permitting

This course will provide an overview of environmental regulatory programs in Florida. While the course will broadly cover environmental permitting across a variety of media, we will focus our attention on a case study: the permitting requirements that would typically be associated with greenfield construction.  We will examine the substantive permitting requirements, explore the types of issues that might complicate the process, and discuss how public involvement can shape the outcome.

Natural Resources Law

This is a survey course of federal and state laws pertaining to the use and governance of natural resources, such as water, wetlands, forests, rangeland, wildlife, and energy resources. As opposed to Environmental Law (which is a complement to this course), Natural Resources Law deals with the exploitation of resources, rather than the pollution of them, and as such, contemplates a vastly different system of laws and regulations. This course briefly explores some simple ecological and economic concepts, and how some federal and state laws reflect these concepts.