Organizing Themes of Environmental Law

This article is designed to assist students and lawyers in their work in the field of Environmental Law; specifically, in the area of preventing and mitigating the effects of pollution. The article begins with the origins of modern environmental law. It briefly summarizes the reasons we have environmental problems and describes the inadequacies of the common law responses. This is key to understanding modern environmental statutes, which are designed to remedy the shortcomings of the common law. The main part of the article sets out the various approaches to remedying those shortcomings and gives examples of environmental statutes which take each of these approaches