On Wednesday April 1 I delivered the Fifteenth Annual Lloyd K. Garrison Lecture on Environmental Law at Pace University Law School. I spoke on “The Globalization of Environmental Law” and made the pitch for combining the teaching of domestic and international environmental law into the subject of global environmental law. After giving examples of how global law is developing in several areas, I discussed the forces driving this development. These include the globalization of environmental concerns, increased trade and the growth of multinational enterprise, increased global collaboration of NGOs and government officials, and the influence of multilateral environmental agreements. I then explained why the current global financial crisis should not hinder the development of global environmental law, but rather should serve as an opportunity for promoting green development throughout the world.
I could not have received a warmer welcome from the faculty and students at Pace. Professor Nick Robinson met me at the airport and took me to lunch. In the afternoon I joined Nick, Ann Powers, Jeff Miller, Karl Coplan, Dick Ottinger, and Jamie Van Nostrand for a meeting with NRDC Executive Director Peter Lehner to discuss ways in which the Pace faculty can cooperate with NRDC on environmental issues in New York State. At the lecture Professor Jeff Miller introduced me and Pace Dean Michelle Simon presented me with the Garrison medal. Following a post-lecture reception I went to dinner with a great group of Pace faculty and students.
On Thursday morning I returned to D.C. and then taught my Constitutional Law class in Baltimore. Following class, I joined the students who play on Maryland’s law school softball team to watch a film of their participation in last year’s University of Virginia Law School Softball Tournament in preparation for their departure for this year’s tournament. Thursday night I had dinner with a friend from California who was in D.C. for a medical convention. He had been on my mountain climbing trip to Nepal in 1981 and we reminisced about our adventures there, including meeting Sir Edmund Hillary. On Friday morning I flew to Boston to teach my Environmental Law class at Harvard, which had been rescheduled from Wednesday due to my visit to Pace.
On Saturday morning I left D.C. at 5AM to drive to Charlottesville, Virginia where I spent a really enjoyable weekend at UVA’s Law School Softball Tournament. More than 100 teams from more than 50 law schools participated in the competition. Maryland fielded four teams, three in the coed division, and I played on one of the coed teams. Our top coed team defeated teams from Harvard, Fordham, the University of Connecticut, Rutgers-Camden, University of Baltimore, and Catholic University to reach the semifinals where they won a close game against perennial champion UVA Gold. They then finished second in the competition after losing to a great team from the Appalachian School of Law in the championship game. Unlike last year, the weather was terrific in Charlottesville. More than 50 Maryland students played in the tournament and we all had a great time.
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The topic of your lecture resonated a lot with me. Just two days back, I was delivering a guest lecture ( I am a litigator of a small law firm with environmental law as its focus) at the Madras Law College (Madras being a coastal city in the South of India) talking of how global environmental concerns had influenced environmental jurisprudence in India, specifically about how the Indian Supreme Court had incorporated the precautionary principle, the polluter pays principle, the principle of inter generational equity and the principle of sustainable development (however ambiguous it may be) as central concerns of all environmental legislation, without actually having specific mention in the text of the legislation itself. I look forward to reading a low cost Asian edition of your book when it arrives on the Indian market.
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