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!
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 ...
One of the prices those of us who publish chapters in edited collections pay is that our writing often does not get the exposure it would were it published in a journal. So I'd like to bring special notice to a piece by Michael Lobban, "Tort Law, Regulation and River Pollution: The Rivers Pollution Prevention Act and its Implementation, 1876-1951", published in Tort Law and the Legislature: Common Law, Statute and the Dynamics of Legal Change , edited by TT Arvind and Jenny Steele (Hart, 2013). From the introduction: By 1850, the massive urbanisation and industrialisation which Britain experienced over the previous century had generated unprecedented problems of pollution. The mid-century laissez-faire state, with its small central government and fragmented local regulatory bodies, was largely unprepared for these problems, and environmental protection was left in the hands of private litigants - usually wealthy landowners - invoking the common law. However, reform at bot...
It seems I forgot to mention my own article when I posted it a while back. "Riparian Rights in Lower Canada and Canada East: Inter-Imperial Legal Influences" was published as chapter 4 of Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870-1930: Empires and Encounters (Roland Cvetkovski & Volker Barth eds., Bloomsbury, 2015). I'll do a few posts based on the article now; for the full version, please see the book. One of the most dynamic areas of law in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world was that of water rights, or, as it was typically denoted then, “riparian rights”. This body of law dealt with the relative rights of owners of land adjacent to water—riparian land—to use the flowing waters, whether for power, irrigation, transportation, fishing, or waste disposal. The historical development of the law in this field in the nineteenth century has been analysed from several points of view, including economic property theory and Marxian legal history. Transnational as...
Comments
Post a Comment