This article surveys the history of hydropower-salmon tradeoffs in the Columbia Basin in the 20th century. The resolution of those tradeoffs has overwhelmingly favored hydropower, as often the federal agencies running the Federal Columbia River Power System claimed a lack of authority to improve...

Resentment of the federal government's management of public lands runs deep in the arid West, where grazing, mining, and timber once predominated and remain important to rural communities. This resentment bubbled over in 2016 with the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in...

This brief to the Oregon Supreme Court supports youth plaintiffs' claims that the state's failure to develop and implement a scientifically based plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid a climate catastrophe violates the state's public trust doctrine. The brief reviews the history and...

The public trust doctrine is an ancient doctrine of public property law that governs sovereign stewardship of natural resources. The doctrine both promote public access to trust resources and requires sovereign protection of them for the benefit of the public, including future generations. The...

The Klamath River, draining some 12,000 square miles in southern Oregon and northern California, was once the third largest salmon stream on the West Coast, the life force of Native Americans. The river runs 263 miles from headwaters in Oregon and flows through the Cascades to the Pacific Ocean...

The saga of Columbia Basin salmon recovery is one of the foremost natural resource restoration efforts in the United States over the last quarter-century. Although development of the world's largest integrated hydroelectric system crippled the Columbia's salmon runs, Congress declared in 1980...

Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago is Joseph Kearney and Thomas Merrill’s engaging account of how public law affected the development of the Chicago lakefront, is a meticulously detailed history of a century-and-a-half of law and urban affairs. The authors center the book...

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...

Oregon’s public trust doctrine has been misunderstood. The doctrine has not been judicially interpreted in over thirty years but was the subject of an Oregon Attorney General’s opinion in 2005. That opinion interpreted the scope of the doctrine to be limited to the beds of tidelands and...