Environmental Impact Assessments

Environmental Impact Assessments

• Course Number: LAW-252
• Course Type: N/A
• Credits: 3
• Enrollment Limit: Determined by the Registrar
• Restrictions: This class is required for LLM students in the environmental, natural resources, and energy law program and is open to interested MSL students. It is not open to JD students. 
• Description:  The world over, a fundamental task of environmental law is to guide and legitimize governmental decision-making vis-à-vis the environment. Whether the decision is to authorize a major infrastructure project, to grant a concession for extraction of natural resources, or to issue any of the myriad of regulations that negotiate humanity’s interaction with the environment, law should—and usually does—have a say as to how government renders these decisions, how citizens can participate in the process, and to what extent citizens can seek legal recourse in the face of violations of decision-making norms or adverse effects flowing from such decisions.

Leveraging the basic framework of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Principles 10 and 17 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, this online, asynchronous course explores how national and international law treat environmental impact assessments, access to information, citizen participation in environmental decision-making, and access to judicial or administrative relief concerning decision-making and resultant impacts.

Although the course employs a comparative law approach, it devotes more time to analysis of U.S. law, particularly NEPA and, in lesser measure, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Analysis of these statutes and associated case-law does double duty: first, it provides a thorough understanding of these laws’ fundamental aims, common litigation disputes, and associated judicial decisions; second, it offers a point of reference for comparison to analogues in other countries and select treaties. Roughly speaking, around two-thirds of the course content will deal with U.S. law, with the remaining one-third dedicated to analysis of foreign and international law.

• Prerequisite: none
• Evaluation Method: Writing assignments and participation in the discussion board
• Capstone: N/A
• WIE: N/A