Law & Environment

Welcome! This is the home page for my Law and Environment class (Legal Studies/Environmental Studies/History 430). This page provides resources for doing research on topics in environmental law, with a focus on U.S. law. On the right sidebar there are links to resources specifically on U.S. environmental law, including: 1) environmental law and regulation by topic, from the lead federal agencies for each topic (the EPA, FWS, etc.), which identify and provide links to the relevant federal laws; 2) the EPA’s pages on civil and criminal cases; and 3) research guides. On the footer below there are links to a sample of U.S. government agencies and other national organizations (businesses and NGOs) that address environmental issues in one way or another.

For your research papers, here are some tips about defining your topic, and about using some of the web resources available on this and related pages.

For sources and guides to U.S. law in general (i.e., that are not focused just on environmental law), go to the page on American Law & Legal History.

Click here for Local, Wisconsin, and Midwestern Legal Sources and Guides to environmental law topics.

Click here for International & Global Legal Sources and Guides.

Click here for a summary of the simplified guidelines to legal citations recommended for use for the research paper for this class.

For additional resources, contacts, and related classes here at UW (though not all have a legal focus), see the following:

Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and its four research centers on Climate Change (CCR), Culture and History (CHE), Land Tenure (LTC), and Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). For a list of courses related to environmental law, see the ES Curriculum page, under Theme Courses, then Policy.

Websites of UW scholars on environmental law, policy, and history include Prof. William Cronon’s website, and his class on American Environmental History; and, in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Ecology, Prof. Adena Rissman’s Rissman Research Group. See also, especially for wetlands and water policy, Prof. Morgan Robertson in the Geography Department.