The practice of environmental law today is increasingly attentive to environmental justice, and interest in centering environmental justice in the practice of environmental law has only grown in more recent generations of environmental law students. Why have considerations of environmental justice and race nevertheless remained marginalized in the teaching of environmental law?
This Article represents the first critical environmental law casebook review in three decades and is the first to center environmental justice and race. It uses an original empirical analysis of twenty-two environmental law casebooks dating back to 1978, around the time the core environmental laws shaped the field.
This Article’s scholarly contributions are threefold. First, it identifies the dominant features of environmental law casebooks and assesses their treatment of environmental justice and race. Second, it critically analyzes key findings related to the constraining effect of the core environmental laws, the focus on cost-benefit analysis, and the limited treatment of both environmental justice and race. Third, this Article offers recommendations for how to update casebooks to better serve today’s environmental law students and future practitioners.
