Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

Abstract

The past twenty years of environmental law are marked as much by legislative stasis as by profound change in the way that lawyers, policymakers, and scholars interact with the field. Although no new federal legislation was passed over the past two decades, much has changed about the field of environmental law. This change is the result of a set of conceptual and legal challenges to the field posed by intellectual and policy movements that took root in the early 1990s. The intellectual and policy movements that have most profoundly shaped the field of environmental law in the past twenty years are: the property rights movement, the environmental justice movement, and cost-benefit analysis. These movements and policy tools arose, in large part, as a response to the major legislative and policy successes of the 1960s and 1970s. This Essay looks back at some of the key environmental law articles published by the Fordham Environmental Law Review during the last twenty years to illustrate the development of each of these areas. This influence stretches from the judiciary, where some of the articles have significantly shaped important parts of the doctrinal landscape, to some of the ongoing intellectual and policy debates among environmental scholars.

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