I'm happy to report that Feedspot has named Environment, Law, and History one of the top 100 environmental blogs. Thanks to all of you - the readers, writers, commenters, mentioners, and so on - who made it happen!
This past summer I noted that I posted a draft of my "Historical Analysis in Environmental Law" (on SSRN and Academia ), forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Research, edited by Markus Dubber and Chris Tomlins. I believe there's still some time for modifications, so I'll post a series on it now, and hope some of you will have some helpful comments! Environmental law has no history. This is not to say environmental law has no past; indeed, scholars are beginning to uncover its historical roots. What I mean by having no history is, first, that there is a general feeling, common to legal historians and environmental lawyers (particularly in the United States), that environmental law is something new under the sun, having emerged in the 1970s from the environmental crises of the preceding decade (such as the Cuyahoga River catching fire) and a contemporaneous sharpening of ecological consciousness (spurred, most prominently, by Rachel Carson's Sile...
(Continuing the series on water rights - the first installment was here .) Property in water takes a great variety of forms. Many countries' laws state that all water is the property of the public or the state ( Trelease, 1957 ; Cumyn, 2007 ; Sun, 2009 ; Schorr, 2013 ). Most civil law countries, following Roman law, distinguish between public and private waters. The "absolute dominion" rule of the common law, still in force in some American states, treats groundwater as an unowned resource, open to capture by any overlying landowner ( Dellapenna, 201 3). The riparian rights system of the common law views water sources as the common property of all landowners abutting the source ( Getzler, 2004 ). The system of prior appropriation applied in the western United States recognizes private property rights to amounts of flows of water. In Australia ( Davis, 1968 ) and western Canada the Crown owns the water and distributes it to users through a permit system ( Percy, 2005 ). ...
The latest issue of Grotiana (noted by Legal History Blog) has an article by Sylvie Loriaux, "Grotius and Kant on Original Community of Goods and Property" . The abstract: Immanuel Kant This paper is interested in the critical potential of the idea of original common possession of the Earth. On the basis of a comparative analysis of Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant, it shows how different the meaning of this idea can be within a theory of property or territory. The first part is devoted to Grotius’s account of why and how the institution of property was progressively introduced. It highlights the importance this account attaches to the intention of the first distributors for a good understanding of property laws, and in particular, for an understanding of their non-application in situations of extreme necessity. The second part takes the opposite path and shows that although Kant rejects the very existence of a right of necessity, the idea that one might be liberated from a la...
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