Environmental Law

Pending Washington v. U.S. Supreme Court Decision Offers Hope & Vindication for Tribes, Coastal Fisheries

Truth be told, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2017-18 Term has been an unsually quiet one for environmental and natural resources law.  Until now.

On Tuesday, February 6th, I led my Spring 2018 Water Law students on a visit to the California Supreme Court to attend oral arguments in a major water law case pending before the justices. The Supreme Court session began with a warm welcome to our King Hall delegation from Chief Justice of California Tani Cantil-Sakauye, herself a proud King Hall alum.

On Saturday, January 20th, I had the opportunity to accompany a number of King Hall water law students to the 14th Annual Water Law Symposium, held this year at UC Berkeley. The symposium is an extraordinary collaboration among six different Northern California law schools--including King Hall. Remarkably, this annual event is wholly student-organized and -produced, and recently won an American Bar Association award as the best law student-organized event in the nation. It's also become California's premier water law conference.

As 2017 comes to a close, let's take a moment to assess the California Supreme Court's most significant environmental law decisions of the year.

There are a large number of decided cases to choose from: as has been true over the past decade, in 2017 the California Supreme Court devoted a substantial portion of its civil docket to cases of interest to environmental lawyers, organizations and the regulated community.  With that caveat, here's my list-an admittedly subjective one-of the Court's five most important environmental decisions of 2017:

UC Davis School of Law has launched an exciting new Water Justice Clinic designed to advocate for clean, healthy and adequate water supplies for all Californians.  The new Clinic is a project of the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies, in partnership with the  California Environmental Law and Policy Center, and will offer unique environmental justice advocacy opportunities for King Hall students.

On Friday, April 7th, I had the opportunity to lead my King Hall Ocean and Coastal Law students on a field trip to the UC Davis Marine Biology Laboratory in Bodega Bay, California.  The Lab, founded by the University of California a half-century ago, is the site of pioneering marine science research by UC Davis faculty and graduate students who work at the Lab.

Professor Lesley McAllister recently blogged over at Environmental Law Prof Blog about last week's successful environmental law symposium at King Hall.

Here's an excerpt:

UC Davis School of Law is proud to co-sponsor a festschrift for King Hall's own Professor Lesley McAllister.

Here is the invitation and program information from the Center for Progressive Reform. The event will take place next week in San Francisco, where many legal scholars will be attending the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting.

On October 14, I led a field trip for my California Environmental Law & Policy Issues students to UC Davis' Tahoe Environmental Research Center at Incline Village. There they heard a series of presentations on Lake Tahoe Basin science, law and environmental policy relevant to their studies on Tahoe-related legal issues.

Faculty members at UC Davis School of Law publish truly unique scholarship that advances the legal profession. You can view their scholarly works via the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Legal Scholarship Network. An archive can be found on this web page.

What follows here is the most recent collection of papers.