Sample Syllabi for 9th edition of Environmental Regulation Casebook
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW – FALL 2025
Class meets in Room 108
Mondays and Wednesdays 4:55-6:20pm
Professor Robert V. Percival Email: rpercival@law.umaryland.edu
Office: Room 481
Phone: (410) 706-8030
Faculty Assistant: Emily Martinez
Room 443
Email: emartinez@law.umaryland.edu
Office hours: The professor will try to be in his office on Wednesdays from 1:30 to 2:30pm or you may make an appointment to meet at another time by contacting the professor by email at rpercival@law.umaryland.edu
For more information about the Environmental Law Program, contact William Piermattei, Managing Director, in Room 480, (410) 706-8157, email WPiermatti@law.umaryland.edu
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Environmental Law! This class is being held at a critical time for environmental law as the Trump administration moves aggressively to repeal environmental regulation and to halt enforcement of it. With Congress in gridlock on most environmental issues, fierce battles are being waged in the courts on how to interpret the environmental laws. A highly conservative Supreme Court seems determined to roll back environmental protections even as Congress has resisted efforts to repeal the basic legal infrastructure of environmental law.
COURSE OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES
This course focuses on how legal institutions have been used to respond to environmental problems. While the common law had been used for centuries to address highly visible pollution problems, during the last 55 years the public law of environmental protection has grown dramatically to become a vast and complex field of law. Given its vast scope and enormous complexity, environmental law cannot possibly be covered comprehensively in a one-semester survey course. Thus, this course is designed to provide a basic introduction to the most important concepts in environmental law through selective coverage of topics. Many topics that are not covered in depth are the subjects of seminars that students are encouraged to take.
The course begins with an introduction to environmental problems and the values that animate environmental protection policy. It examines the legal barriers that have
made it difficult to redress fundamental issues of racial and economic justice raised by the disproportionate exposure of minority and low-income populations to environmental harm. It then provides a structural overview of environmental law, tracing the legal system's transition from the common law to the modern regulatory state and reviewing issues of federalism and regulatory policy implicated by this development.
After examining how the regulatory process operates, the course then focuses on the problems regulatory policy faces in seeking to prevent harm in the face of scientific uncertainty and the question of how precautionary regulatory policy should be. It examines the principal models for determining how stringently to regulate and burden-shifting and informational approaches to regulation. The course examines the difficulty of implementing regulatory legislation by focusing first on federal hazardous waste legislation (the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)). The course then contrasts this regulatory approach with the liability approach employed by Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which extends principles of strict liability to broad classes of parties associated with releases of hazardous substances.
The course then reviews the structure of federal air and water pollution control programs, focusing on how the Clean Air Act can be used to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases and whether it delegates too much power to EPA. The course then considers the controversy over the jurisdictional reach of the Clean Water Act. This is followed by exploration of constitutional limits on land use regulations to protect the environment and a review of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess and to consider the environmental consequences of major federal actions, and the Endangered Species Act, which seeks to preserve biodiversity. The course concludes by exploring environmental enforcement and efforts to use international law to protect the planet.
Students in this course can expect to develop enhanced skills and knowledge in five major areas: (1) Students should gain a good understanding of the basic structure of environmental law, which will enable them to identify, and to assist in resolving, environmental law issues that they may encounter in their subsequent professional lives. (2) Because most federal environmental law is the product of legislation, students will have the opportunity to develop and enhance statutory analysis and interpretation skills. (3) Students should gain a basic understanding of the regulatory process that is used by administrative agencies to develop and promulgate regulations. (4) This course also will explore how principles of constitutional law affect the regulatory authority of Congress and the states. (5) Students should develop an enhanced ability to critique regulatory policy choices.
COURSE BLACKBOARD ULTRA WEBSITE
This course relies on the Blackboard Ultra system to inform students of assignments and the course schedule. The course website posted on the Blackboard contains all the information that you will need for this class. In addition to this syllabus, the website contains a Discussion section and material that will provide additional information about the subjects covered in this course.
REQUIRED COURSE MATERIALS
(1) Percival, Schroeder, Miller & Leape, Environmental Regulation: Law, Science & Policy (Aspen, 10th ed. 2024). First published in 1992, this is the most recent edition of the most widely used environmental law casebook in the country, published in August 2024.
I apologize for the price of the casebook. I was truly shocked when I heard how much the publisher is asking for it. I repeatedly complained about the price to the publisher, but obviously they did not listen to me. Because the professor is the principal author of the required course materials, all royalties the professor earns from the class's purchase of the books are used to fund summer environmental law grants administered by the Maryland Public Interest Law Project (MPILP) as well as the annual environmental law winetasting for which the professor provides all the wine. For students unable to afford a personal copy of the casebook, the professor has arranged for the school’s Thurgood Marshall Law Library to place copies on reserve.
(2) Casebook Website: The casebook website at www.erlsp.com include A “2025 Update” covering the most important developments occurring after publication of the casebook. Please read these updates as we cover each chapter of the casebook. The website also includes information about pending cases and photos of the sites of famous environmental cases.
OPTIONAL READING MATERIALS
(1) Percival & Schroeder, Environmental Law: Statutory and Case Supplement 2024-2025 (Aspen 2024). This statutory and case supplement, published in August 2024, is available only in electronic form. It contains the text of the principal federal environmental statutes, outlines of the principal provisions of the statutes, and legislative history timelines organized in the same chapter format as the casebook, as well as excerpts from important recent court decisions.
(2) Vandenburgh, Light & Salzman, Private Environmental Governance (Foundation Press 2023). This book reviews private initiatives to protect the
environment that occur outside the standard government-focused model including certification programs, supply chain contracting, and corporate environmental and social governance (ESG) programs. With the Trump administration seeking to dismantle long-standing environmental protections, these initiatives are now more important than ever.
ANNUAL FEDDER LECTURE AND PROGRAM WINETASTING
Every year on the Friday before Thanksgiving the Environmental Law Program hosts its annual Fedder Lecture and Winetasting Party, which usually attracts a large number of environmental alums. This year the Fedder Lecture is scheduled for Friday November 21 at 5:30pm in the Ceremonial Moot Courtroom. We are honored to have as this year’s lecturer Richard J. Lazarus, the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law at Harvard University. Richard has argued more Supreme Court cases on behalf of the environment than anyone in history and his lecture will focus on the Court’s recent anti-environmental jurisprudence. The Fedder Lecture will be followed from 6:30-9:00pm by the annual Environmental Law Program Winetasting.
CLASS PREPARATION AND THE DISCUSSION BOARD
Most of the material to be covered in this course is well-suited to the lecture and discussion method of teaching. Lectures will try to do much more than simply repeat material in the assigned readings. They will try to provide insights on how environmental laws and policies were developed and their impact in the real world.
Because of the breadth and complexity of the environmental law field, much of the material we cover is challenging and you will have to do a lot of reading. My commitment to you is that I will do everything I can to help you understand it and to make it more enjoyable. Class discussion of the material is important and students should be prepared to be called upon in class, particularly those students who do not volunteer regularly to participate in class discussions. To help keep all of us healthy all class sessions will be recorded and available for subsequent viewing on the Blackboard website so those who are feeling ill need not come in person.
To provide a focal point for class discussion, the professor will prepare a Discussion question before each class session. To prepare for class, the professor invites students to post a short response to the question on the Discussion section of the Blackboard course website after you have completed the reading for a class, but before the class meets. These responses will help jump-start our in-class discussion and, as students have discovered in the past, they ultimately provide excellent
preparation for the final exam. Students are required to post a response to the question on the Discussion Board for the first class of the year on August 25. Please try to make your post a few hours before class so that I have a chance to digest it before we the start class. After the August 25th class, posting on the Discussion section of the Blackboard website is optional, but encouraged. Students also may email the professor directly with questions.
SMALL GROUP PROJECT OR SHORT PAPER
In addition to the reading assignments students are asked either to participate in a small group film project or to prepare a brief (4-page) paper answering a question about environmental law (Blackboard Discussion questions are fair game). Students opting for the small group film assignment are asked to make a short film (5 to 7 minutes in length) to present the group's position on an environmental issue. Since 2002 students have produced wonderfully creative films. You may view some of them online at: https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/envirofilms/
A rough first cut of your film is due on the last day of class (November 24) when the student films will be shown to the class in the Ceremonial Moot Courtroom. Students then may edit their films over Christmas break before submitting their final cuts by January 26. Films made in class will be considered for prizes (we call them the "Golden Tree" awards) awarded to the best films in various categories. The awards will be presented in March 2026. This exercise, which will not be graded, is designed to give everyone the experience of trying to translate and communicate often complex issues of legal policy into a form lay persons can understand. Students are encouraged to post their videos online – You Tube really can help change the world. In the past students have found that this exercise opened some new horizons for them and it also has enabled the professor to write more interesting recommendations for many students.
Those students who elect not to participate in a film project may instead write a 4-page memo on an environmental topic of your choosing (or you may simply use the topic of one of the Blackboard Discussion questions). This assignment also will be ungraded. Both projects should be completed by the last day of class on Monday November 24 when the films will be shown in class.
GRADING POLICY
Your final grade in the course will be determined by your grade on the final exam. The final exam will consist of essay questions based on material in the assigned readings and any material presented in class. During the exam, students may consult their notes and the required or recommended course materials, but no other materials (e.g., treatises or nutshells) may be consulted during the exam. Student posting on
the Discussion Board of the course website will not be graded, but past experience has demonstrated that students who respond to the discussion questions with regularity find themselves better prepared for the final exam.
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW PROGRAM
We welcome you to the Environmental Law Program’s extended family. By successfully completing this course. students interested in qualifying for the certificate of concentration in environmental law will have completed an important requirement for it. The Environmental Law Program’s commitment to you is that we will do everything we can to help advance your career path. Our greatest pleasure is helping students get their dream jobs. A copy of our alumni directory, which will be posted on the Blackboard website, shows that our program has been enormously successful due to our terrific, devoted network of environmental alums.
COURSE OUTLINE & LIST OF READING ASSIGNMENTS
CHAPTER 1: ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES
MONDAY AUGUST 25: Introduction to the Course, Environmental Problems and Values, Environmental Justice and Corporate Environmental Responsibility. ASSIGNMENT: Read (1) pp. 1-26 and 1175-1184 in the casebook; (2) § 101 of the National Environmental Policy Act, 42 U.S.C 4331, which will be posted on the Blackboard website and (3) post a brief response to the questions on the Discussion Board of this website.
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 27: Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Social Cost of Carbon, Ecosystem Services, the Tragedy of the Commons, ANWR and Pipeline Controversies. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 28-57 in the casebook.
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 1 – LABOR DAY (NO CLASS)
CHAPTER 2: ENVIRONMENTAL LAW: A STRUCTURAL OVERVIEW
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 3: The Common Law Roots of Environmental Law: Private and Public Nuisance. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 59-92 in the casebook.
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 8: The Rise of the Regulatory State, Environmental Federalism, Displacement of Federal Common Law and Preemption of State Law, and Introduction to Environmental Standing. ASSIGNMENT: Read (1) pp. 92-130 in the casebook, and (2) “Environmental Legislation in Historical Perspective,” which will be posted on the Blackboard website.
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 10: Environmental federalism, constitutional authority to protect the environment, and the regulatory process. ASSIGNMENT: Read (1) pp. 130-149 and 166-179 of the casebook, and (2) Excerpt from Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which will be posted on the Blackboard website).
CHAPTER 3: PREVENTING HARM IN THE FACE OF UNCERTAINTY
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 15: Risk Regulation in the Face of Uncertainty: How Precautionary Should Regulatory Policy Be? and Introduction to the PFAS Problem. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 185-210 and 225-227 of the casebook.
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 17: Risk-Benefit Balancing, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Flint Lead Poisoning Scandal, and Regulation by Revelation. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 231-259, 278-285, and 290-297 of the casebook.
CHAPTER 4: REGULATING WASTE MANAGEMENT
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 22: Introduction to the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act, What Is “Solid Waste,” Which Wastes Are Hazardous, Subtitle D and Coal Ash. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 303-334 and 342-347 in the casebook.
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 24: Introduction to CERCLA, Liable Parties: Owners and Arrangers, and CERCLA Remediation. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 347-363, 370-381, and 389-394 in the casebook
CHAPTER 5: AIR POLLUTION CONTROL
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 29: Introduction to the Clean Air Act, What Is an Air Pollutant and Controls on Mobile Sources. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 448-484 in the casebook.
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 1: Establishing and Revising National Ambient Air Quality Standards. ASSIGNMENT: Read (1) pp. 477-500 & 509-523 in the casebook and (2) § 109 of the Clean Air Act which will be posted on the Blackboard).
MONDAY OCTOBER 6: Nonattainment, Prevention of Significant Deterioration & Regulation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Control of Multi-State Air Pollution. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 523-545 & 558-574 in the casebook.
CHAPTER 6: CONTROL OF WATER POLLUTION
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 8: Introduction to the Clean Water Act and the Scope of Federal Jurisdiction. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 580-610 in the casebook.
MONDAY OCTOBER 13: Regulation of Discharges from Point Sources, Water Quality Standards, and Total Maximum Daily Loadings. ASSIGNMENT: Read (1) pp. 610-636, 661-666, 684-696, and (2) excerpt from City and County of San Francisco v. EPA, which will be posted on the Blackboard website.
CHAPTER 7: LAND USE REGULATION AND REGULATORY TAKINGS
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 15: Land Use and Regulatory Takings. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 719-759 in the casebook.
MONDAY OCTOBER 20: The Parcel as a Whole & Regulatory Exactions. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 759-793 in the casebook.
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 22: Impact Fees as Regulatory Exactions, Judicial Takings and Evolving Conceptions of Property Rights. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 793-810 in the casebook.
CHAPTER 8: ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT
MONDAY OCTOBER 27: Introduction to NEPA, When Must an Environmental Impact Statement Be Prepared? ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 811-823 and 843-856 in the casebook.
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 29: What “Effects” Must Be Considered, Climate Change, Analysis in Uncertainty. ASSIGNMENT: Read (1) pp. 856-890 in the casebook, and (2) Excerpt from Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which will be posted on the Blackboard website.
CHAPTER 9: PRESERVATION OF BIODIVERSITY
MONDAY NOVEMBER 3: Why Preserve Endangered Species, Introduction to the Endangered Species Act, What Species Are Protected, Critical Habitat
Determinations, Delisting and Species Recovery Plans. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 897-910, 919-935 in the casebook.
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 5: Protecting Endangered Species Against Private Action: §9 of the Endangered Species Act, Incidental Takes, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Protection of Endangered Plants and the Future of Biodiversity Protection. ASSIGNMENT: Read: pp. 947-967 in the casebook.
CHAPTER 10: ENVIRONMENTAL ENFORCEMENT
MONDAY NOVEMBER 10: Monitoring and Detecting Environmental Violations and Criminal Enforcement. ASSIGNMENT: (1) Read pp. 969-991, 994-1011 and (2) Visit the EPA’s Most Wanted List at https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/epa-fugitives
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 12: Citizen Suits and Standing. ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 1011-1014 and 1021-1053 in the casebook.
CHAPTER 11: PROTECTION OF THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
MONDAY NOVEMBER 17: International Environmental Law and Protection of the Global Atmosphere. ASSIGNMENT: Read (1) pp. 1069-1107 in the casebook and (2) the International Court of Justice’s summary of its advisory opinion on Obligations of States in Relation to Climate Change, which will be posted on the course Blackboard website.
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 19: Trade and the Environment and International Trade in Hazardous Substances, ASSIGNMENT: Read pp. 1108-1142 in the casebook.
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 21: FEDDER LECTURE in the Ceremonial Moot Courtroom from 5:30-6:30pm followed by ENVIRONMENTAL LAW PROGRAM WINETASTING in Westminster Hall from 6:30-8:30pm.
MONDAY NOVEMBER 24: Presentation of Small Group Movie Projects in the Ceremonial Moot Courtroom. For those who elect to do the paper instead of the film project, the papers are due on this day.
MONDAY DECEMBER 1: Optional review session – come prepared with questions.