1 Introduction to Volume II Robert L Glicksman and LeRoy C Paddock The George Washington University Law School, USA Abstract This introductory chapter provides an overview of the growth of environmental law and the decision-making structures that governments have developed to adopt, administer, and enforce it. It traces the manner in which cooperative federalism and public par- ticipation have affected decision-making structures in environmental law, primarily in the United States. It summarizes key challenges that policymakers continue to face in designing environmental laws, including choices on the allocation of authority among different levels of government, the appropriate mix of regulatory and non-regulatory tools to use in environmental protection initiatives, efforts to accommodate environmen- tal protection and economic growth objectives, techniques to spur useful government action in the face of political stalemates, balancing the benefits of public participation with the potential for participatory procedures to slow or derail the implementation of environmental laws, and determining the role of judicial review. The chapter concludes with a road map of all of the other chapters in the book. Contents 1 The birth of modern environmental law 2 Cooperative federalism in environmental law 3 Public participation 4 The challenges of environmental decision making by governments 5 Chapter summaries 1 The birth of modern environmental law This introductory chapter focuses on the development of environmental law and associ- ated decision-making processes in the United States (US) because the country pioneered many of the decision-making processes that are now common around the world. The US system is also particularly informative because the federalism issues in the US, which result in a complicated set of interactions among various levels of government, are now shared by other federal countries, for example, Brazil, and are present in the relationship between law-making at the European Union (EU) level and within the nations that make up the EU. By understanding the structure and processes of US environmental law, the reader should gain a broad understanding of the critical steps in, and the complexity of, environmental decision making that will then be explored in more detail in the individual chapters. Environmental laws can be traced back centuries, certainly as early as the first century AD in Roman law. The Justinian Institutes in 535 AD provided that: ‘by the law of nature these things are common to all mankind: the air, running water, the sea, and con- sequently the shores of the sea’. Smoke abatement ordinances appeared as early as the Robert L Glicksman and LeRoy C Paddock - 9781785369520 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 07/21/2020 03:26:02PM via free access