This article applies public choice political theory to public lands decisionmaking and concludes that it explains why multiple-use management, the paradigm for most federal public lands, consistently overemphasizes commodity production at the expense of other values like watershed protection and...

The public trust doctrine was resurrected by Professor Joe Sax in a famous article a half-century ago. Sax explored the doctrine's history and maintained that it had contemporary significance at the time of the dawn of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Sax thought that the historic use...

This paper, a celebratory essay marking the 50th anniversary of the first issue of Environmental Law, the nation's oldest and most comprehensive law student-edited law review, discusses the background of the founding of the journal in 1970 and surveys the many symposia and leading articles it...

This edited speech, delivered at a land use conference shortly after the Supreme Court decided Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission in 1992, questioned several premises of the decision and criticized Justice Scalia's opinion for the Court. The essay suggested that the Court lost its way in...

Professor Blumm traces the evolution of the modern public trust doctrine in the West. He claims the doctrine is best understood by focusing on the remedies courts prescribe for trust violations. Although he sees four distinct categories of remedies in the case law, he asserts that they all...

Pacific salmon, the signature species of the Pacific Northwest, have declined across their range for well over a century, due to a myriad of human-caused effects on their habitat and the fish themselves. Restoration efforts—some successful, some halting—began earnest in the late 20th...

One of the principal, if unexpected, results of the Supreme Court's 1992 decision in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission is the rise of background principles of property and nuisance law as a categorical defense to takings claims. Our writings on the background principles defense have...

Clyde Martz published the first natural resources law casebook in 1951, combining the previously discrete subjects of water law, mining law, and oil and gas law. Martz relied almost exclusively on case excerpts and emphasized the creation of private rights in natural resources. Over the...