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

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

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

SEQRA\u27s Siblings: Precedents from Little NEPA\u27s in the Sister States

The technique of environmental impact assessment has emerged as the principal regulatory tool for assuring that each person acts so that due consideration is given to preventing environmental damage. Just as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires that each of the federal government\u27s agencies assure that its decisions will be environmentally sound, so have many of the various states decreed that their agencies and political subdivisions shall maximize environmental protection

Historic Preservation Law: The Metes & (and) 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

Transnational Perspectives on the Paris Climate Agreement Beyond Paris: Redressing American Defaults in Caring for Earth’s Biosphere

Anxiety about the fate of human civilization is rising. International Law has an essential role to play in sustaining community of nations. Without enhancing International Environmental Law, the biosphere that sustains all nations is imperiled. Laws in the United States can either impede or advance global environmental stewardship. What is entailed in such a choice? The biosphere is changing. At a time when extraordinary technological prowess allows governments the capacity to know how deeply they are altering Earth\u27s biosphere, nations experience a perverse inability to cooperate together. The Arctic is melting rapidly, with knock on effects for sea level rise and alterations in the hydro-logic cycle world-wide. As both the UN Global Environment Outlook (Geo-5) or the Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “Global Warming 1.5° C” indicate, global environmental trends are destabilizing and can overwhelm societies on each continent. Governments do not respond effectively. Their tepid response to climate change, as embodied in the Paris Agreement of 2015, is the best evidence that States need to reassess their cooperation. Shallow considerations of realpolitik no longer suffice. Nor do otherwise conventional questions, born of once sound practices from the “business as usual” eras, about how governments might methodically shape new treaties or incrementally advance international law while Earth\u27s biosphere rapidly degrade. States will need to rediscover the benefits and burdens of international cooperation. The aspirational norms of the United Nations Charter are still in force, albeit too little encouraged. More than needing reaffirmation, they require progressive development. Collaborative principles of law can be framed to provide the shared vision that States will require as the Earth\u27s human population grows from 7.6 billion today toward 9.8 billion by 2050. This article suggests the contributions that international environmental law can made toward this objective

Updating New York’s Constitutional Environmental Rights

The stakes are high as New York State considers whether to amend the constitution. The electorate contemplates the gathering crises of sea level rise, disruption of weather patterns, intensified summer heat waves, and other climate change impacts. New York also faces escalating environmental problems, which the newly perceived climate impacts in turn exacerbate. It is timely to debate whether or not New York should recognize the right to the environment to its constitution. In 2016, the House of Delegates of the New York State Bar Association adopted the report of its committee on the constitution, regarding the environmental conservation article XIV. That report did not take a position on whether to expand the Constitution’s existing environmental rights to recognize a broad environmental right explicitly. A task force of the association’s section on environmental and energy law examined the issue for six months and concluded that there is merit in recognizing the right to the environment. This article introduces the emergence of this issue in its historical context