Environmental Politics and Law
- Free
- No certificate
Environmental Politics and Law is John Wargo's Spring 2010 course EVST 255, recorded for Open Yale Courses as 24 lectures of about 50 minutes. Its organising question is whether law can change behaviour that damages the environment, and it answers through case histories: nuclear experiments, secrecy and the National Environmental Policy Act; mercury in marine food chains; site restoration; pesticides and chemically dependent agriculture; safe drinking water; air quality and vehicle emissions; plastics; tobacco law; land use, conservation and property rights in the Adirondacks and on public lands; coastal management under climate change; green building certification; and nuclear and renewable energy policy. For each case the lectures review the structure of the law and weigh its strengths and weaknesses.
The syllabus lists four books and describes the take-home midterm and final that campus students wrote; online viewers are not graded. Lectures are available as streaming or downloadable video, audio and searchable transcripts. Open Yale Courses is free, needs no registration and offers no certificate or credit.
What you’ll learn
- Explain the main principles and strategies used in environmental law
- Analyse case histories on nuclear testing, mercury, pesticides and drinking water
- Describe how air-quality, vehicle-emission and plastics rules developed
- Compare land-use, conservation and property-rights law using the Adirondack example
- Evaluate coastal, energy and green-building policy in an era of climate change
Who it’s for
Readers interested in how US environmental regulation actually works, taught through concrete cases rather than statute-by-statute.
Source: Yale Online (opens in a new tab) · Verified · Report a change
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