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The website of the Institut Heritage Studies has three reviews of the oddly titled (or translated)  40 Years World Heritage Convention: Popularizing the Protection of Cultural and Natural Heritage by Marie-Theres Albert and Birgitta Ringbeck (De Gruyter, 2015). Some excerpts from Klaus Hüfner's review: The Convention for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention) was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in November 1972, but only came into force in 1975. The Convention, to date ratified by 191 States, belongs without doubt to the most successful international legal documents; it enjoys a tremendous popularity not only in Germany but also worldwide. ***** The volume consists of seven chapters. The introductory Chapter 1 postulates the preservation of heritage as “an exceptional political, participatory and interdisciplinary act” (p. 2). It follows that it is necessary both in the nomination as well as in measures for the preservation of cultu...

After beginning the digital library of historical environmental law with works from the last few hundred years, we go back in time this week to the fourteenth century and the  Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis  (1355,  1576 edition (source of the images in this post) here ) of the great medieval Italian jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato. As Bartolus explained at the beginning of the work, he was inspired to write the book while on vacation near Perugia, despite his attempts to enjoy his vacation and stay away from legal scholarship: This river [Tiber]... circles that splendid mountain on which the city of Perugia is situated and while flowing a great distance through its district, the river itself is bordered by plains, hills and similar places. These places are also well inhabited, enhanced with many beautiful buildings and luscious orchards bearing lots of fruit. Thus, when I was resting from my lecturing and in order to relax, was travelling towards a certain villa situated near ...

Title page of Jan Kochanowski’s Satyr albo dziki mąż (1564), a political satire in verse that criticized forest exploitation. (National Digital Library Polona, from the article) Forest law continues to provide grist for scholarship. October's Environmental History published, alongside an article on early Chinese forest law , Mateusz Falkowski's "Fear and Abundance: Reshaping of Royal Forests in Sixteenth-Century Poland and Lithuania" . The abstract: This article analyzes new restrictive forest legislation announced by king Sigismund Augustus (d. 1572) in Poland and Lithuania. In the sixteenth century, eastern Europe remained the most densely forested region on the continent; Poland and Lithuania, however, were blessed not only with resources but also with an unusual combination of plains, forests, rivers, and seaports that facilitated the development of large-scale forest industries. Drawing on a combination of royal documents, domain surveys, correspondence, customs ...

Restored perennial and season marsh and riparian forest at Wildlands Mitigation Bank, Placer County, California ( EPA ) The always interesting Dave Owen recently posted "The Conservative Turn Against Compensatory Mitigation" , whose primary subject is the recent turn described in the article's title ( compensatory mitigation is a policy that require parties receiving permits for environmentally harmful activities to compensate for them by improving environmental conditions elsewhere). Owen also has something to say about the origins of the practice, rejecting the arguments of critics who have portrayed compensatory mitigation as part of a neoliberal, capitalist resurgence : The proponents of compensatory mitigation reform hardly ever identified their efforts as measures to boost the capitalist system . As one retired departmental employee explained to me, even during the Reagan Administration, debates about compensatory mitigation were driven more by conflicts over regul...

This week's installment in the digital library of environmental law moves ahead to the twentieth century with Carl E. Geuther's Compendium of Water Pollution Laws ,  published in 1959 by the Manufacturing Chemists' Association, headquartered in Washington, DC. This was the fifth in a series of "Water Pollution Abatement Manuals" published by the trade organization, evidently with a target audience of engineers, managers, and other non-lawyer employees of the chemical industry. Geuther, a lawyer, worked at the time for Du Pont Chemicals; he also seems to have represented them and other chemical companies in court at various times. The Preface explains that the manual is: a compendium of the laws of the forty-nine states (including the District of Columbia, the Territory of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the federal laws of the United States as they pertain to water pollution and water pollution abatement). Statutes and regulations of archaic vintage that are ignored by ...

A strange message hit my email inbox today, advertising an upcoming event hosted by an Israeli law school and a leading Israeli environmental NGO to celebrate 25 years of Israeli environmental law . I'm more than a little puzzled by this as I'm not sure how exactly they came up with 1993 (or thereabouts) as the beginning of Israeli environmental law. Important environmental statutes, including the Regulation of Trades and Industries Ordinance, 1927; Oil in Navigable Waters Ordinance, 1936; Public Health Ordinance, 1940; Wild Animal Protection Law, 1955; Abatement of Nuisances Law, 1961; and the 1971 water pollution amendments to the Water Law (itself enacted in 1959) all predate 1993 by quite a bit. The Abatement of Environmental Nuisances Law, 1992 more or less fits the timing, but it happens to be a pretty unused (and useless) law. (I've written about a number of these statutes in a book chapter, "A Prolonged Recessional" ( Academia and SSRN ).) Old Knesset (par...

UC Davis recently hosted a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the California Air Resources Board . Richard Frank reports at Legal Planet : CARB convened for the first time in January 1968, following enabling legislation prompted by the chronic, crippling smog that enveloped Southern California, its residents and economy in the 1950’s and `60’s.  The Board quickly became a national and international leader in air pollution regulatory strategy and pollution control technologies for stationary and vehicular sources alike.  That leadership was reflected in the 1970 Clean Air Act, when Congress granted California–alone among the states–the authority to adopt vehicle emission standards more stringent than those promulgated by the federal government.  (Attendees were reminded at the “CARB at 50” conference that this longstanding federal deference to California auto emission standards is due in large part to strong and successful lobbying by then-California Republica...

Following up last week's post on Michael Lobban's piece on the British Rivers Pollution Prevention Act, 1876 , the second work to be added to our digital library of historical environmental law is Clement Higgins's  A Treatise on the Law Relating to the Pollution & Obstruction of Watercourses ,  published in London by Stevens and Haynes in 1877 (a year after enactment of the water pollution legislation). (An 1882 advertisement for the work is here .) Just as the treatise on game law covered here last week emphasized the inherent conflict of interest between different social groups and the distributive effects of the law, Higgins writes in the Preface: It is to the interest of the public, and to the majority of riparian proprietors, to protect the purity of our rivers, whereas it is generally to the convenience of sanitary authorities and of manufacturers to pollute them. An attempt is made in this book to place before the protectors of our rivers the nature of their ri...

Barada River in Damascus Yehoshua Frenkel, a professor at University of Haifa and member of our local environmental history forum , recently pointed me to a 2011 chapter by Boaz Shoshan on water law, "Mini-Dramas by the Water: On Irrigation Rights and Disputes in Fifteenth-Century Damsacus" . The abstract: Apart from discussions of matters of irrigation in legal works, medieval sources provide us with little information on the human dynamics and social interaction that are an integral part of irrigation systems. Some cases involving water were straightforward, whereas others were not. A laconic statement about a settlement ( ṣulḥ ) that was reached in Muḥarram 886/March 1481, in the presence of the viceroy of Damascus and the chief qāḍīs, between one Kamāl al-Dīn and Shihāb al-Dīn al-Muḥawjib concerning water that was coercively ( zulman ) diverted from the al-Manshīya river canal, provides us with only a faint echo about such conflict. Fortunately, on other occasions of wate...

One of the prices those of us who publish chapters in edited collections pay is that our writing often does not get the exposure it would were it published in a journal. So I'd like to bring special notice to a piece by Michael Lobban, "Tort Law, Regulation and River Pollution: The Rivers Pollution Prevention Act and its Implementation, 1876-1951", published in Tort Law and the Legislature: Common Law, Statute and the Dynamics of Legal Change , edited by TT Arvind and Jenny Steele (Hart, 2013). From the introduction: By 1850, the massive urbanisation and industrialisation which Britain experienced over the previous century had generated unprecedented problems of pollution. The mid-century laissez-faire state, with its small central government and fragmented local regulatory bodies, was largely unprepared for these problems, and environmental protection was left in the hands of private litigants - usually wealthy landowners - invoking the common law. However, reform at bot...

So (as Ann Wilson sang), the first post in the digital library of historical environmental law series is on  A New Treatise on the Laws for Preservation of the Game,  first published in 1764; the second edition, available online , was printed in London in 1766 by His Majesty's Law Printers. The title page gives the author as "a Gentleman of the Middle-Temple"; said gentleman was apparently one Timothy Cunningham , a prolific author of law books in eighteenth century Britain. The title of "Gentleman" may have been about more than manners or class, as the long title of the treatise has this explanation ( Oklahoma!, anyone? ): "Containing All the Statutes, Cases at Large, Arguments, Resolutions and Judgments concerning it; equally useful to the Gentleman and Farmer; as the Gentleman may learn how far his Privilege extends, and the Farmer may be enabled to know when the Gentleman exceeds the Limits prescribed by Law, and the proper Methods of Redress." So ...

In order to add some variety to the Environmental, Law, and History blog, as well as to create something I hope will be of lasting value to those interested in the field, I've decided to begin a series of posts on old books on environmental law, and then collate links to the works in an online "digital library". By "environmental law" I mean anything substantially focused on the interaction of law and what we think of today as environmental issues (including "natural resources"), and by  "old" I mean written no later than 1970. My preference will be for works in the public domain and easily accessible on line, though I'll also link to editions available only in for-pay databases when appropriate. (I also admit to a preference for the odd, the funny, and the bizarre, though these are admittedly subjective criteria and I do not intend to limit myself to them.) I hope to be able to do this on a weekly basis, so please look for the posts on S...