Environmental Human Rights in New York’s Constitution

There is an environmental case to be made in favor of convening a Constitutional Convention. On the 200th anniversary birth of Henry David Thoreau, we can remember his admonition: “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” What has this to do with the Constitution

David Ross Brower and Nature\u27s Laws

“We\u27re not blindly opposed to progress. We\u27re opposed to blind progress.” These words summed up the style and power of David R. Brower. Indelibly, he chiseled toe hold after toe hold on an arduous climb across the rock face of the commercial forces driven to seek short-term gain from natural resources and oblivious to the longer-term costs to the Earth that the ecological sciences would chronicle but that economists would disregard as mere “externalities” in their classical market models. As Brower campaigned to protect the wilderness of North America and the Earth, through his sheer conviction and abundant eloquence, he emerged between 1952 and 1988 as an architect of contemporary environmental government policy toward nature

Ici-bas!

High school student Moses King isn\u27t a goody two-shoes, but the bully Samuel doesn\u27t understand (or care) about this fact. In this story written by Nicholas Koloian, Moses finds his retribution through his bold friend, Henry, who must overcome his own problems in a tale exploring race, sexuality, and high school bullying

Address at the Lincoln Charter of the Forest Conference, Bishop Grosseteste University: The Charter of the Forest: Evolving Human Rights in Nature

This conference is a singular event, long over due. It has been 258 years since William Blackstone celebrated “these two sacred charters,”1 Carta de Foresta and Magna Carta, with his celebrated publication of their authentic texts. In 2015, the Great Charter of Liberties enjoyed scholarly, political and popular focus. The companion Forest Charter was and is too much neglected.2 I salute the American Bar Association, and Dan Magraw, for the ABA’s educational focus of the Forest Charter, as well as Magna Carta. Today we restore some balance with this conference’s searching and insightful examination of the Forest Charter’s significance

The Most Fundamental Right

The Magna Carta and successors recognize a right to the environment as central to human existence. Along with associated rule of law and due process, 193 national charters recognize such a right — but not the U.S. Constitution. This right does lie latent in America’s state constitutions, however, and can also be read into the federal document as well. Meanwhile, recognition of environmental rights is expanding globally

Historic Preservation Law: The Metes & Bounds of a New Field

Historic Preservation Law has come to mean that combination of regulations, common-law property principles, tax incentives, and adjective law in administrative proceedings, governing historic sites and property within the United States. Although Congress first recognized a need to conserve the nation\u27s wealth of historic amenities in 1906 when it adopted The Antiquities Act, it was only with the nation\u27s bicentennial that the volume and diversity of laws designed to maintain, protect and preserve historic America grew to the point where it could be said that a new field of law had emerged. The symposium which follows this essay represents the first attempt to comprehensively delineate the elements of this new field. The conference entitled Historic Preservation and the Law: The Metes & Bounds of a New Field gathered 500 persons for two days at the House of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in September of 1978.s Organized by the Association and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, this conference traversed the entire range of preservation legal issues, from asking what is historic? to identifying the need for law reform already apparent in this new field. The proceedings of this conference comprise this symposium. By way of introduction, this essay provides background and a conceptual framework for the presentations which follow. This essay can best introduce the symposium by delineating first the scope of regulation by exercise of the police power and the definitions for what resources are historic, then the elements of real property law which transect these regulations, and thereafter the operation of municipal ordinances and federal procedural statutes which are the body of historic preservation law. The essay will then raise several of the thorny issues currently in dispute within this evolving field