Top 100 environmental blog

I'm happy to report that Feedspot has named Environment, Law, and History one of the top 100 environmental blogs. Thanks to all of you - the readers, writers, commenters, mentioners, and so on - who made it happen!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Historical Analysis in Environmental Law V: What is to be done? Police, public health, statutory nuisances, planning and zoning, labor law, and literature

Image
In the last post in this series  I suggested looking at the histories of commons regulation, forest law, and 'police' to better understand the historical roots of modern environmental law. Before moving on to note several other relevant areas of historical law, I would like to note that while critics ( most recently Markus Dubber ) have impugned police for its broad discretion and patriarchal foundations, these very elements were powerful enablers of environmental regulation in the public interest. Moreover, the opposing tradition that Dubber identifies—the Enlightenment ideal of the 'rule of law'—has often used the liberal ideal of private property to frustrate public-minded environmental regulation. In any case, police regulations, with their wide remit and geographic dispersion , are natural places to look for sources of modern environmental law. Noga Morag-Levine has indeed made the connection between early modern 'science of police' and later regulation of ...
Read more

Water rights II - Systems of property rights in water

Image
(Continuing the series on water rights - the first installment was here .) Property in water takes a great variety of forms. Many countries' laws state that all water is the property of the public or the state ( Trelease, 1957 ; Cumyn, 2007 ; Sun, 2009 ; Schorr, 2013 ). Most civil law countries, following Roman law, distinguish between public and private waters. The "absolute dominion" rule of the common law, still in force in some American states, treats groundwater as an unowned resource, open to capture by any overlying landowner ( Dellapenna, 201 3). The riparian rights system of the common law views water sources as the common property of all landowners abutting the source ( Getzler, 2004 ). The system of prior appropriation applied in the western United States recognizes private property rights to amounts of flows of water. In Australia ( Davis, 1968 ) and western Canada the Crown owns the water and distributes it to users through a permit system ( Percy, 2005 ). ...
Read more

The legality and legitimacy of Japanese whaling - Part II

Image
[Second and final part of a guest post by Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith - Part I is here .] The second point to take away from Arch’s book is that when organized whaling became established in early modern Japan, under the watchful eye of domainal lords ( daimyo ), who could decide who had jurisdiction over particular whaling areas, or over bodies of whales either washed up on shore or brought to a particular shore for processing, regulation was a way of dealing with the local problems of particular businesses, and of their interrelationships, and of the ways those businesses could benefit the domain through fee exactions, as a kind of tax-like income for the domain. It was not about ensuring the continued availability of whale meat as a food source. Indeed, when it took hold and expanded during the Tokugawa peace, Japanese whaling was not primarily about food. It was about profit and about ensuring the continued supply of a wide range of whale products. Sutter is eloquent on this point: W...
Read more