Analysis of Environmental Law Scholarship 2017-2018
The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of some of the most creative and feasible environmental law and policy proposals from the legal academic literature each year. The pool of articles that are considered includes all environmental law articles published during the previous academic year. The law journal articles that are re-published and discussed are selected by Vanderbilt University Law School students with input from their course instructors and an outside advisory committee of experts. The purpose of this Comment is to highlight the results of the ELPAR article selection process and to report on the environmental legal scholarship for the 2017-2018 academic year, including the number of environmental law articles published in general law reviews versus environmental law journals, and the topics covered in the articles. It also presents the top 20 articles that met ELPAR’s criteria of persuasiveness, impact, feasibility, and creativity, from which five articles were selected to re-publish in shortened form, some of them with commentaries from leading practitioners and policymakers. Thus, the goal of this Comment is to provide an empirical snapshot of the environmental legal literature during the past academic year, as well as provide information on the top articles chosen by ELPAR.