Environmental Law

The energy industry is heavily regulated yet energy law is a rapidly changing field. The goal of this course is to provide an overview of energy law by examining selected topics in the law of extraction, generation, and distribution of energy resources in the electric, natural gas, and oil industries. This course does not address the transportation industry. This course concentrates on the role of state and federal agencies, the balance between regulation and competition, and the transition to renewable energy. Taking Administrative Law prior to this course is recommended, but not required. Online asynchronous course. Students may take up to 41 credits under the 83-credit requirement (43 under the 86-credit requirement) toward their J.D. degree through courses that are designated "distance education courses." A distance education course is one in which students are separated from all faculty members for more than one-third of the instruction and the instruction involves the use of technology to support regular and substantive interaction between the students and all faculty members, either synchronously or asynchronously. Source: ABA Standards Definition (7) and 306.

This condensed online introduction to environmental law surveys the common law, statutory and regulatory foundations of U.S. environmental regulation. Topics are drawn from federal regulation of air, water, and land pollution as well as review of projects impacting the environment. The course uses a problem-based approach in which students analyze hypothetical environmental controversies in online discussion forums and written problem analyses. Online asynchronous course. Students may take up to 27 credits under the 83 credit requirement (28 under the 86 credit requirement) toward their J.D. degree through courses that are designated "distance education courses." This course counts toward the distance education credit limit. A distance education course is one in which students are separated from the faculty member or each other for more than one-third of the instruction and the instruction involves the use of technology to support regular and substantive interaction among students and between the students and the faculty member, either synchronously or asynchronously. Source: ABA Standard 306(a).

The Institute of Medicine defines public health as "what we, as a society do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy." Unlike health care, which focuses on medical interventions to improve the health of individual patients, public health takes a broader look at the wide-ranging determinants of population health. Although various interventions have been devised to protect health at the population level, disparities in health outcomes persist, with marginalized communities--racial and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, low socioeconomic status people--bearing a disproportionate amount of negative health outcomes. These inequitable health outcomes are largely products of structural and institutional factors that are grounded in the law. This course will adopt a critical approach to law--along the axes of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity, and class--to examine how the law creates, sustains, and legitimizes inequitable health outcomes. This critical approach will be used to analyze the legal dimensions of current public health issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the obesity epidemic, tobacco control, healthcare access, natural disasters & climate change, and socio-political determinants of health to challenge students think beyond the traditional paradigms of legal reasoning. Students may take this course for 2 or 3 credits. Students planning to satisfy the long paper requirement in this course, and students who have already satisfied the long paper requirement and plan to write another long paper in this course, should register for three credits. This is a HyFlex course.