Environmental Law Seminar: Health and the Environment

This class will immerse students in advocacy for environmental justice and the right to a safe, healthy, clean, and sustainable environment. It will help students connects the dots between inequality, exposure to pollution, and vulnerability to the looming climate crisis, and will cultivate student ability to think creatively about how law can respond to environmental injustice. Building on the United Nations prediction that by 2050 two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, this class will focus on urban environments, and will use New York City as a case study. Drawing on the core environmental justice principles of fair treatment and meaningful involvement, this class will explore the many ways that local environmental and land use decisions in cities like New York impact the health and welfare of affected communities. We will examine how federal environmental laws, regulations, and policies intersect with these local land use choices to shape the distribution of both public goods like greenspaces, public transit, quality schools, safe streets, and public ‘bads’ like power plants, waste transfer stations, and truck routes. Students will trace the spillover environmental and health implications of those choices, including disparately high asthma rates, COVID-19 infection rates, and levels of childhood lead poisoning in environmental justice communities. Drawing on urban commons theory, we will consider how different framings of public and private property might disrupt or support these local land use choices. Throughout the semester, students will work collaboratively to identify legal problems, and possible law-based or regulatory-based solutions to contemporary problems of environmental justice and related social justice concerns such as food justice, disaster justice, and climate justice.