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On Earth Day 🌎, our special ⭐️FACULTY FOCUS⭐️ is on Professor Jason Czarnezki, the Gilbert and Sarah Kerlin Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law and the Associate Dean of Environmental Law Programs and Strategic Initiatives. Professor Czarnezki teaches Natural Resources Law, Sustainable Business and the Environment, Property, and the Environmental Law Seminar: Current Challenges. His leadership in the Pace I Haub Environmental Law Program has led to its consecutive ranking as the #1 program in the country!
Q: As we reflect on Earth Day, what advice can you give students to make a difference in saving our planet and promoting conservation and sustainability?
A: The low-hanging fruit include, to name a few: try to eat organic and local, eat less meat and shift away from red meat, live close to where you work and play, see if your household can get along with only one car (and try to make it a fuel efficient one), walk and take public transit, compost as much as possible, stop engine idling, buy compact fluorescent light bulbs, adjust down the thermostat, decrease household water temperature, keep proper tire pressure, and work to educate yourself about the ecological and economic costs of your actions in the long term. Engine idling, for example, accounts for a substantial portion of carbon emissions and fuel consumption, measured at 1.6% of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions and 10.6 billion gallons of fuel per year.
A generational environmentalist, learn about Professor Czarnezki’s recent research interests, his family full of outdoor enthusiasts, and more in his Q&A here:
https://fal.cn/3nZx3
Despite the urgency coming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a transition from fossil fuels to clean energy cannot happen without first having acceptable alternatives, says Dean Emeritus Professor Richard L. Ottinger of Pace I Haub Environmental Law in his article published by Bloomberg Law. Solar and wind installations must be built first, and transmission lines. No country would accept the economic disruption of premature action on abandoning fossil fuels, he says.
Assistant Professor Josh Galperin of Pace I Haub Environmental Law breaks down the 2018 “farm bill,” as well as provides exciting suggestions for big change in the upcoming 2023 farm bill for WCBA Lawyer Magazine. The farm bill, one of Congress’ most complex legislative efforts as well as the last bipartisan effort, expands 11 broad policy areas, each represented by a different title of the bill.
Leading up to the 2018 farm bill, Professor Galperin joined fellow Haub Law Professors Margot Pollans and Jon Brown as well as faculty at Duke, Harvard, UCLA, Vermont Law School and Yale to create the Farm Bill Law Enterprise. Together they recognized the need for nonpartisan expertise, clear expression of values and an eye to the future of American food systems and worked to make the complex policy areas more digestible, as well as provide recommendations to Congress for areas of improvement.
As the Farm Bill Law Enterprise looks towards the 2023 farm bill, they have been planting seeds for big change and engaging students in vigorous research to assist with making further recommendations. “The Farm Bill Law Enterprise has its sights set on the future, which means that the recommendations we develop are meant to sustain and transform farm bill policy. It also means we have a responsibility for training the next generation of leaders,” Professor Galperin shares.
Read the article:
https://fal.cn/3nxil
The Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University is once again ranked number one in the country for Environmental Law by the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings, released today. This is the second year in a row, and the third time in four years, that Haub Law has received the number one ranking for Environmental Law, marking the latest major success for Pace I Haub Environmental Law.
Haub Law also received a #32 ranking in ADR in this year – a significant increase from #67 last year. Our part-time program increased in the rankings as well, moving up to #47, and our trial advocacy program once again ranked in the top 15% of law schools, coming in at #26 this year.
“Since its founding decades ago, our Environmental Law Program has been at the forefront of training the environmental leaders and advocates of tomorrow,” said Dean Horace E. Anderson Jr. “We are very proud of the leadership positions that our alumni have attained at government agencies, law firms, and NGOs, and of our program’s consistent recognition as being at the pinnacle of the field. We are also pleased with the strong rankings for our Dispute Resolution program, our Trial Advocacy Program, and our part-time program. I am proud of the work we have done and continue to do each day at Haub Law to provide our students with a stellar legal education.”
Read more about our 2023 rankings here.:
https://fal.cn/3nlkh
Students at Haub Law put practice into action! Several students in the Pace I Haub Environmental Law program recently enjoyed a fun and informative trip to Catskill Merino farms, a small sheep farm in Warwick, NY specializing in superfine merino wool products.
Organized by the Pace-NRDC Food Law Initiative, students learned about farmland access issues in the Hudson Valley. They discussed the farm’s goal of developing an agritourism enterprise on the farm, and the risks involved in bringing the public onto an operating farm. Using this information, students have been hard at work drafting a liability waiver based on their assessment of the particular risks on the property and reading of the law.
Pace I Haub Environmental Law Professor Katrina Fisher Kuh was quoted in the E&E News article “Biden Supreme Court nominee faces big climate questions.”
“We’re now seating justices who are going to be steering the ship as we deal with increasingly disruptive climate effects,” said Professor Kuh. “These are the justices who will be guiding our legal response to all of the impacts we’ve known are coming for a very long time but that seem to be manifesting more quickly and with greater severity.”
Haub Law Professor Noa Ben-Asher was featured in University of Washington School of Law's Discovery Podcast series discussing how emotional trauma has fueled legal and policy social justice reforms in the three key social justice movements of our time: , , and climate change.
In the episode, titled “The Injury Point” Professor Ben-Asher warns that, even as we have advanced our understanding of trauma as a modern characteristic of our times, we are in danger of overlooking structural solutions to broader social injustice.
Pace I Haub Environmental Law
Will private actors, including multinational corporations, lead a new era of environmental progress? In her article in the Westchester and Fairfield County Business Journal, Pace I Haub Environmental Law Professor Katrina Fischer Kuh breaks down key takeaways from the 2022 Gilbert and Sarah Kerlin Lecture on Environmental Law presented by Roger Martella, Chief Sustainability Officer at GE, explaining why we are at an inflection point for corporate sustainable responsibility.
Read the article:
https://fal.cn/3mXS2
Pace I Haub Environmental Law Professor Margot Pollans discusses how the laws governing our food system make eaters powerless in her new article published by Michigan law Review.
"Food law, including traditional food safety regulation, antihunger programs, and food system worker protections, has received increased attention in recent years as a distinct field of study. Bringing together these disparate areas of law under a single lens provides an opportunity to understand the role of law in shaping what we eat (what food is produced and where it is distributed), how much we eat, and how we think about food. The food system is rife with problems—endemic hunger, worker exploitation, massive environmental externalities, and diet-related disease. Looked at in a piecemeal fashion, elements of food law appear responsive to these problems. Looked at as a whole, however, food law appears instead to entrench the existing structures of power that generate these problems."
Read the article:
https://fal.cn/3mxZM