Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of US Environmental Law

Open to the public.

US laws as far back as North America’s colonization have been perhaps the key driver of exploitation and temperance; destruction and restoration; and resistance and adaptation. While leadership, social movements, political coalitions, information, and technologies have catalyzed and advanced environmental change, legal imagination has played an underappreciated role in reckoning with environmental harm in the United States.

About the Speaker:
Alejandro Camacho is a professor of law at UCLA School of Law, where he teaches courses in property, natural resources law, and environmental law. His research often explores the goals, structures, and processes of regulation, with a particular focus on natural resources law, public lands law, pollution control law, and land use regulation. His writing generally seeks to reconsider the role of public participation and scientific expertise in regulation, the allocation of authority between public institutions, and how the law’s goals and strategies must and can be reshaped to effectively account for emerging technologies and the dynamic character of natural and human systems.