In theoretical accounts of environmental law, traditional environmental-law education, and much of the discourse of environmental-law implementation, negotiation is absent, except in a few celebrated and seemingly exceptional settings. When scholars and policy advocates do address the roles of negotiation, they tend to default to two competing conceptions. In one—the “command-and-control” view—environmental law is problematically centralized and rigid, and negotiation exists only in exceptional circumstances.

Choice architecture as defined by Professor Mormann in Climate Choice Architecture is helpful and important, but it is also easy to overestimate its impact. It is not everything. This Comment argues that choice architecture is framing a decision at the point of decisionmaking, presenting a list in a specific way, like the decoy effect, setting defaults. Sometimes, social norms and feedback is choice architecture if presented at the time of making a decision or if presented at the optimal choice opportunity.

Prof. Felix Mormann’s Climate Choice Architecture provides a comprehensive framework and a masterful summary of the state of knowledge on behavioral nudges as they are applied to environmental outcomes. It does a great job of summarizing the literature and also crosses over from energy into water as well. This Comment supports Professor Mormann's conclusion that nudges can be very powerful instruments for achieving climate goals.

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. This Comment highlights the results of the ELPAR article selection process and reports on the environmental legal scholarship for the 2022-2023 academic year, including the number of environmental law articles published in general-interest law reviews versus environment-focused law journals, and the topics covered in the articles.

Development impacts many aspects of the food system, including where food is grown, how far food must travel, where distributors and retailers are placed, and who has access to fresh and nutritious food. By viewing development and its associated impacts through a sustainability and life-cycle lens, we can rethink the role of development and how communities can grow while fostering a strong, inclusive, affordable, accessible, and healthy food system. This Article focuses on the way local governments regulate development and how that impacts the food system.

In China, the year 2023 witnessed the further evolution of environmental protection and development of legislation and rulemaking. This mainly included adoption of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Ecological Protection Law, revision of the Marine Environmental Protection Law of the People’s Republic of China, and adoption of a series of judicial interpretations. This Comment summarizes some of the year’s major developments.

The U.S. Supreme Court's October Term 2022 had major implications for environmental law, including its most significant Clean Water Act decision ever. Upcoming cases in October Term 2023 have the potential to be just as impactful. On September 25, 2023, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a panel of experts who provided an overview of key rulings and major take-aways from the Court’s prior term, and discussed cases that have been granted review or are likely to be considered by the justices in the upcoming term.

This Comment argues that what is needed to make sustainability work for business is a National Business Sustainability Council that would develop and promulgate sustainability criteria, be able to evaluate whether specific small businesses are meeting those criteria, and be able to “certify” that a small business is, in fact, meeting these criteria, and is therefore “sustainable.” It asserts the Council’s criteria and evaluation methodology should be both rigorous and transparent, such that when the Council awards a sustainability certification to a business, the federal and state governmen

The fashion industry continues to grow exponentially, along with marketers’ use of false and misleading claims about “sustainability” and other environmental attributes of fashion garments. This Article explores recent instances of greenwashing in the industry and other countries’ efforts to address the issue, and proposes specific ways that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should improve its guidelines for environmental marketing claims and expand enforcement.

In How Algorithm-Assisted Decisionmaking Is Influencing Environmental Law and Climate Adaptation, Ziaja provides a useful framework to analyze whether an algorithm-assisted decisionmaking (AADM) tool and its design process is procedurally equitable. Ziaja’s framework contains several different questions advocacy groups can use to analyze the AADM tools that are increasingly used for environmental resource governance, such as the INFORM and RESOLVE algorithms discussed in the article, which guide the allocation and distribution of water and energy resources.