Many years ago, I had the pleasure of having Prof. J.B. Ruhl as my guest at the annual Environmental Law Institute awards dinner in Washington, D.C. (For those of you who have not had the opportunity to attend, the dinner is a testament to the environmental bar's collegiality.) At the time, J.B., now the Matthews & Hawkins Professor of Property at Florida State Law School, was teaching at George Washington University Law School and in the midst of publishing a series of intriguing law review articles applying "complexity theory" to environmental law.

I thought of J.B. recently when a pair of circuit court decisions (Connecticut v. American Electric Power Co. (AEP) and Comer v. Murphy Oil USA3), issued within a month of one another, reopened the possibility of addressing the challenge of climate change through common-law actions under the public nuisance doctrine.

J.B.'s articles offered many suggestions for "[r]eversing th[e] reductionist influence" on environmental law, including "a complete overhaul of our approach to legislation, administration, and jurisprudence" so as to "produce a system that de-emphasizes the regulations attractor by de-emphasizing the place of codified rules within the system." Among his suggestions, J.B. called for greater reliance on the common law.