Learning Objectives.

​Introduction to U.S. Law, Policy, and Research -- an Environmental Perspective provides hands-on use of online legal resources and of and of readings of opinions, statutes, and casebooks to allow students to achieve the following goals:

1. To develop legal literacy and read opinions of important cases that elucidate the common law and environmental and toxic torts, environmental administrative law, and environmental regulation through the application and testing of statutory law in the courts;
2. To use legal research tools to find “good law” by analyzing precedent, to understand citations, to locate statues and their associated rules and regulations, and to find cases that determine the meaning of statutes;
3. To write briefs of cases at a professional level; to write an internal memorandum of law as a municipal attorney; to research a specific federal environmental statute, its rule and regulations, and its associated case law and prepare a memorandum to explain how case law determines the meaning of a statute;
4. To understand the origins, history, and structure of the U.S. legal system; to understand the ecological and ethical bases of environmental law, its use in environmental policy and decision-making and its role in cost-benefit analysis and risk management.​​