Document Type

Article

Publication Title

West Virginia Law Review

Abstract

The subject I am going to talk about today is one of intimate concern to all of us. In speaking about the environment, you are talking about a boom industry. When I graduated from the Yale Law School in 1968 you could not find a subject called environmental law anywhere in the curriculum. Quite the opposite, you had a few old standard nuisance cases and the odd statute here and there that dealt with matters which today would go under the general environmental umbrella. There was no systematic or comprehensive overview of the subject. That overarching perspective became visible with Earth Day in 1970. Since then there has been a bewildering array of legislation that has been passed on all subjects relating to the environment, and it would be impossible to sort them all out in a single lecture, in a systematic or even semi-responsible fashion. One just has to list the kinds of topics that are relevant to the discussion to gain some sense of the breadth of the issues that you are facing. If you can breath it, you worry about air pollution. If you can drink it, you worry about water pollution. If you can stand on it, you worry about whether it is a wetland. If you can develop it, you worry about whether or not the trees should be chopped down. If you can hunt it, you worry about whether or not it is an endangered species. The list goes on and on and on. In effect, the area of. environmental law today is so complicated, so exhaustive, that it can consume the lifetime of anybody attempting to master it. Since I do not wish to preempt the second Frank Lyon lecturer, what I am going to do is to provide something of a general overview of the subject - how I think it ought to be approached - which can then be illustrated by a few useful examples.

First Page

859

Volume

93

Publication Date

1991

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