Green Ethics in the Legal Community

Since about the 1990s, green ethics have become increasingly more prominent in the legal community. In 1993, for example, the year after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the first American law school course was offered on sustainability, at Willamette. Although law schools have lagged behind liberal arts colleges and European institutions in adopting green practices, they have responded to the needs of the incoming student body and the changing legal community and have offered a number of programs on sustainability law, in addition to the older traditional programs in natural resources law. The rise of new technologies, such as biofuels and nanoparticles, ecological disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, and new international treaty frameworks like the Kyoto Protocol have all contributed to ...