Principles of environmental law

Professor Jonathan Verschuuren has posted an interesting paper that analyzes the “things lawyers call principles of environmental law.” Professor Verschuuren examines, among other things, what constitutes a principle, the legal status of environmental principles, the role of principles in legal evolution, and the prospect of using principles, such as the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle, to forge effective linkages between the “ideal” of sustainable development and concrete legal rules and decisions.

Although I have not had time to work on the mapping of the principles of environmental law to information law so as to promote the ideal of sustainable intellectual development, I need to bump that project up on the old “to do” list. Maggie Chon is doing some very interesting work on IP and development (e.g., Intellectual Property and the Development Divide). Fortunately, she will be coming to Chicago in the spring for our Chicago IP Colloquium to present a paper, Constitutionalizing the WTO: Intellectual Property’s Balance in the Context of Global Social Welfare.