ENV 642a () / 2024-2025

Environmental Justice/Climate Justice

Credits: 3 Fall 2024: M,W, 10:30-11:50, Burke

This course focuses on the evolution and development of the environmental justice movement and environmental justice law in the United States. We will begin with a legal and social-historical survey and trace that history to the current moment. We explore traditional environmental law's shortcomings and the legal and policy developments that have followed the environmental justice critique. Concepts of environmental and climate justice have driven the environmental legal movement since its inception, but only recently has environmental justice law been recognized as a legal field. This course will introduce students to contemporary legal regimes, debates, and social movements in the U.S. territories, Indian Country, and Hawai’i to explore how many environmental justice communities have responded to (or resisted) mainstream modalities of environmental law.
 
This course will explore law as one of many levers in enacting environmental justice, and students will consider how grassroots organizing, public awareness and education, and litigation fit together in environmental and climate justice movements. Our discussion of environmental litigation will consider traditional environmental statutes, complex tort (i.e., toxic/climate tort) actions, and constitutional case law. The class will consider how environmental conditions and climate change implicate peoples’ rights, including climate migration, drinking water access, Tribal sovereignty, food access, industrial agriculture, and human health and well-being.
 
For the final, each student chooses a particular movement or lawsuit (or one expression of it) and writes a paper bringing to bear all the questions we raise this semester. (For example, how did opposition from environmental justice advocates lead to a reformed climate change initiative in California? Or what lessons can we learn from Rise St. James’ legal challenge against disproportionate pollution in “Cancer Alley”?) The paper need not focus on a domestic response because the environmental/climate justice critique is now global. 
 
Note:This class will follow the Yale School of the Environment calendar.