Beyond Environmental Law: Policy Proposals for a Better Environmental Future

Alyson Flournoy is Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in Gainesville.

Professor Flournoy has taught various environmental law courses including the environmental law survey course, Advanced Environmental Law and Litigation (a simulation-based skills course emphasizing the pre-trial phase), Comparative Environmental Law, and seminars on environmental law, as well as Administrative Law and Property. She also collaborated with colleagues from Environmental Engineering and Medicine to develop and teach an inter-disciplinary course on Environmental Ethics. In addition to teaching in the United States, she has taught environmental law at Warsaw University as part of the Introduction to American Law Program, and has taught comparative environmental law to classes that included students from France and Latin America in UF Summer Study Abroad Programs in France and Costa Rica. She has supervised LL.M. research on environmental law topics by Comparative Law graduate students from Taiwan, South Korea and Brazil. 

Since 1990, Professor Flournoy has served as a Trustee of Florida Defenders of the Environment (FDE), one of Florida's longest established and best respected conservation groups. She served on the Executive Council of the Board from 1993 to 1995 and as President of the Board of Trustees from 1995 to 1998. FDE was founded in 1969 by citizens who recognized the potentially devastating effects of the proposed Cross Florida Barge Canal. FDE forged a coalition of volunteer specialists from science, economics and law who led the successful effort to halt the project. FDE's work led to the creation of the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway on lands initially condemned for the Barge Canal. Since that time, FDE has continued its strategy of bringing reliable information to the attention of decision-makers and the public in its ongoing work to restore the Ocklawaha River and to protect Florida's other natural resources. Professor Flournoy also served on a University of Florida Sustainability Task Force charged by President Charles Young to make recommendations on how to make the University of Florida a leader in sustainability. She chaired the effort to create the Environmental and Land Use Law Program and has served as its Director since its inception in 1999.

Professor Flournoy began her legal career in 1983 as a law clerk to Chief Justice Robert Wilentz of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Following her clerkship, she practiced with the firm of Covington and Burling in Washington, D.C., specializing in environmental law. Her work included matters under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (Superfund), the Toxic Substances Control Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. She also spent six months through the firm's pro bono program working in a Neighborhood Legal Services Program office in Washington, where she handled a variety of housing, benefits and other cases on behalf of indigent clients.

Professor Flournoy's scholarship focuses on environmental ethics, decision-making processes under environmental and natural resource laws, and on the intersection of science and law. She has addressed these themes in writings about endangered species and forest management, wetlands conservation and restoration, and regulation of toxic substances. Her most recent work focuses on the importance of identifying the values that are embedded in the nation's environmental laws and policies.

Professor Flournoy is a member of the Executive Committee of the Environmental Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools. She also serves as an Advisor to the Natural Resources Leadership Institute, an organization founded to help rising leaders develop the skills to help build consensus on contentious environmental issues.

Alyson Flournoy
University of Florida
Levin College of Law
Gainesville, FL 
352.273.0945
email
website

David M. Driesen is a University Professor at Syracuse University College of Law, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. He is a member of the editorial board of the Carbon and Climate Law Review, published in Berlin and Environmental Law, published in Oxford.

Professor Driesen has taught and written in the areas of environmental law, international environmental law, and constitutional law for many years.

While in academia, Professor Driesen has devoted significant time to defending the constitutionality of environmental law. He represented the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund in the American Trucking case before the Supreme Court, public health groups in defending California’s Clean Fuel Fleet Programs against a preemption challenge, and constitutional law professors in defending the Endangered Species Act’s constitutionality. He also represented several United States Senators, including Hilary Clinton, in a challenge to EPA's new source review rules in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He has acted as a consultant for American Rivers and other environmental groups on Clean Water Act issues stemming from the Supreme Court's federalism decisions. And he has testified before Congress on lessons from the implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.

Professor Driesen worked as a project attorney and then senior project attorney in the air and energy program for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He also served on EPA National Pollution Control Techniques Advisory Committee. Prior to that time, he was an Assistant Attorney General in the Special Litigation Division of the Washington State Attorney General's Office and a law clerk to Justice Robert Utter of the Washington State Supreme Court.

Professor Driesen has published widely in the areas of environmental law and policy.  He edited and contributed two chapters in Economic Thought and U.S. Climate Change Policy, MIT Press 2009, and edited and contributed one chapter in Beyond Environmental Law: Policy Proposals for a Better Environmental Future, edited with fellow CPR Member Scholar Alyson Flournoy. His book, The Economic Dynamics of Environmental Law (MIT Press 2003), reframes the debate over regulatory reform to take change over time into account. The book argues that static efficiency-based approaches fail to adequately address the tendency of rising population and consumption to increase environmental destruction over time. The book critiques cost-benefit analysis, emissions trading, and free trade-based restrictions on international environmental protection and recommends reforms rooted in an economic dynamic analysis. Professor Driesen received the Lynton Keith Caldwell Award for the book. His most recent book, The Economic Dynamics of Law (Cambridge University Press 2012) further develops the economic dynamic theory and applies it to climate disruption and to subjects outside the environmental realm. He, along with Robert Adler and Kirsten Engel, has also written the textbook, Environmental Law: A Conceptual and Pragmatic Approach (Aspen 3rd ed. 2016).

Professor Driesen has published articles on emissions trading in  Environmental Law, Harvard Environmental Law Review, and leading environmental journals, on cost-benefit analysis in Ecology Law Quarterly, Colorado Law Review and Environmental Law, and on free trade and the environment in the Virginia Journal of International Law. His articles on constitutional law have appeared in the Cornell Law Review and elsewhere. His writing critiquing the dichotomy between "command and control" regulation and economic incentives has been especially widely cited and has helped spawn a more sophisticated third generation literature on economic incentives.

Professor Driesen is known primarily as a critic of efficiency-based law and economics and as a proponent of an alternative approach based on institutional economics and emphasizing stimulation of innovation. He plays trumpet with the Excelsior Cornet Band and the Syracuse University Brass Ensemble. Before going to law school he taught and performed in symphony orchestras in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and Austria, learning German, Portuguese, and Spanish in the process.  

David Driesen
Syracuse University College of Law
Syracuse, NY 
315.443.4218
email
website

SSRN

Twitter: @dmdriesen