Green Justice : The Environment And The Courts

This book explores the interrelationship between the legal system and the environment, using key environmental law cases. It makes the point that the field that we identify as environmental law is only tangentially related to the scientific studies of the environment.

In the nine years since Green Justice first appeared, the field we have come to identi as “environmental law” has taken a number of twists and turns, few of which were foreseen by the authors or, so far as they know, by anyone else. Although this edition attempts to account for many of these changes, it continues to emphasize what we believed then and continue to believe to be paramount, not only for the study of environmental law but for common-law based jurisprudence in general: Despite the immediacy and crush of daily events, closely reasoned analyses of the difficulties and conflicts arising from environmental conflicts, as embodied in major cases or key decisions such as we present here, provide a stabilizing core around which the swirl of daily events takes place, and against which those events must be evaluated. We believed then, and believe even more strongly now, that this is true not only for legal specialists and scholars but for an educated populace as well. Thus this casebook.