Dean\u27s Foreword

This issue of the Pace Environmental Law Review contains a description of this emerging field of law and the response of the academic and legal community to it. As Professor Nolon reports in his introduction, we found eloquent coherence in these laws and saw how they fit together to form a comprehensive whole. We examined state statutes that authorized local governments to adopt environmental laws and discovered that they were diverse in nature but prevalent in many states. We also found state court decisions that upheld local environmental laws against the challenges of regulated property owners. We were troubled by the absence of legal scholarship on the subject, particularly in law school casebooks used to train the next generation of environmental, land use, and municipal law practitioners