Environmental Law and Policy (LAWS90116)

This subject introduces students to the specialised field of environmental law, focusing on some of the key legal and policy issues concerning the regulation of environmental quality. It develops and integrates legal knowledge from a range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary fields (e.g., administrative law and torts law; public policy and economic theory), augmenting this through study of specific environmental legislation and case law to build an understanding of the complex interactions that define environmental law. Topics addressed will include the theoretical foundations, political dimensions, and modes of environmental regulation, the structures of environmental governance and the interpretation of environmental statutes. Case studies considered will provide students with an understanding of the complexities of environmental regulation and liability, such as the regulation of air quality (including greenhouse gases), contaminated sites and hazardous substances.

Principal topics include:

• Theoretical foundations of environmental law, including economic and non-economic perspectives on environmental degradation
• Scientific predicate for environmental regulation: Risk assessment
• Objectives of environmental regulation: Risk management
• Distributional consequences of environmental policy
• Choice of regulatory tools: Command-and-control regulation, marketable permit schemes and effluent fees
• Choice of regulatory tools: Deposit-refund systems, liability rules, informational approaches
• Federalism and environmental regulation
• Environmental law and public choice
• Key case studies that illustrate the complexities of environmental law and liability, including the regulation of air quality, contaminated sites and hazardous substances, with particular focus on the US Clean Air Act and the US Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). Although the focus of the course is not on Australian Environmental Law, parallels will be drawn through the assigned readings.