This advanced seminar examines how U.S. courts, agencies, and legal doctrines address environmental disputes that cross national boundaries. Environmental harm frequently transcends territorial borders—through air pollution, water contamination, climate impacts, and global supply chains—creating complex jurisdictional, regulatory, and enforcement challenges.
The course explores how U.S. law interacts with international environmental principles, including transboundary harm, state responsibility, and international cooperation. Students analyze doctrines such as extraterritorial jurisdiction, the presumption against extraterritoriality, personal jurisdiction over foreign defendants, the Alien Tort Statute, forum non conveniens, and comity. The seminar also examines regulatory enforcement, treaty implementation, and transnational litigation strategies.
The course emphasizes both doctrinal precision and institutional limits, asking whether U.S. courts can effectively resolve global environmental disputes or whether such conflicts require international or diplomatic solutions.
This course assumes prior study of public international law and U.S. constitutional or federal courts law.
Course Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. Analyze U.S. jurisdiction over transboundary environmental disputes.
2. Interpret extraterritoriality doctrines in environmental cases.
3. Evaluate interaction between domestic and international environmental law.
4. Assess personal jurisdiction and forum doctrines in cross-border litigation.
5. Understand the role of federal statutes in environmental regulation.
6. Evaluate transnational tort litigation strategies.
7. Analyze diplomatic and treaty-based dispute resolution.
8. Assess limits of judicial enforcement.
9. Apply doctrine to real-world environmental conflicts.
10. Develop advanced legal-policy arguments.
