JURIST - Johnson: Environmental Law Teachers' Clearinghouse

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The Environmental Law Teachers' Clearinghouse:
An Academic Web Portal

Stephen Johnson, Mercer University School of Law

A few years ago, if a student walked into my office and asked for information about a writing competition or a summer program at another school, I would open a file cabinet and leaf through various brochures and announcements to find the information. If I needed an agency policy or guidance document for an article or for a class, I would search various databases in Lexis or Westlaw, or contact the agency for the document. If I wanted to make any contacts in the teaching community, or learn about resources and programs that faculty were developing at other schools, I would have to travel great distances to attend conferences and symposia. Today, I can do all of those things on the Web. However, the organizational and indexing tools on the Web are quite limited. Thus, while the Web contains a plethora of useful resources for law faculty, it is often quite difficult to locate them.

Until recently, I organized many of those resources simply by adding the Websites to my Netscape bookmark list. While this was more convenient than searching the Web for the sites each time that I needed them, it still left much to be desired. Then, one day while I was browsing through all the useful information on the JURIST website, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be useful to have a website like JURIST for environmental law (my specialization), where I could easily find most of the links that I would need to prepare course materials, research environmental law, network with other faculty, and advise students.” Inspired by JURIST, I developed the Environmental Law Teachers Clearinghouse, (ELTC) an environmental law web portal that organizes the wealth of environmental law resources on the Web and make them more accessible to faculty to accomplish all of those tasks. In addition, by making the wealth of web-based environmental law resources accessible from a single location, the clearinghouse should facilitate and stimulate the growth of Web-based textbooks and instructional materials (or at least web-based course pages).

Further, the clearinghouse should foster the development of a tighter community of environmental law scholars and educators. As described more fully below, the ELTC includes links to faculty web pages, discussion lists, law reviews, audio and video presentations, and a multi-school virtual guest speaker program. Ideally, the site could become a meeting place for faculty, and could foster freer interchange of ideas and resources among faculty. Faculty have already begun to join together in this effort by offering suggestions for additional links for the clearinghouse, including links to their own materials.

Despite its name and the objectives outlined above, the ELTC is not just for environmental law teachers. The clearinghouse contains links to a wealth of information that is useful to law students and non-lawyers. It is divided into four categories of resources: (1) The Law; (2) Class Materials; (3) Exracurriculars; and (4) News. It also includes a “Search” function that allows users to search all of the web pages in the clearinghouse.

As the name suggests, “The Law” category includes web pages that link to the primary environmental law resources that faculty can use for research, or to identify supplementary materials that could be included on an environmental law web course page. “The Law” category includes the following web pages: (a) Laws, Regulations and Policies - links to full-text versions of environmental laws and current agency regulations and policies on the web; (b) Case Law - links to Federal and State judicial decisions that are currently available on the web. Since the “official” Federal appellate sites generally begin coverage in the mid-1990s and few Federal district court decisions are available on-line, I plan to upload major Federal environmental decisions that are not already available on the Web; (c) Agency Materials - links to websites that contain agency adjudicatory decisions and proposed rulemakings; (d) Reports and Publications - links to environmental reports or publications by agencies or interest groups; (e) Agency Web Pages - links to web pages of Federal, State, and International Environmental Agencies; and (f) Organization Web pages - links to web pages of public interest organizations, trade groups or the regulated community.

The “Class Materials” category includes links to course materials and teaching resources. Hopefully, the ELTC will increase access to, and encourage wider use of, innovative class materials that have been developed by faculty, but are not marketed by the major textbook publishers. The Class Materials category includes links to (a) Case Studies - links to simulations and case studies developed by Stanford Law School and other schools; (b) CALI exercises - links to the four environmental law CALI exercises that I developed, with information about how faculty can author their own CALI exercises; (c) Documents and Data - links to actual environmental documents (contract provisions, environmental impact statements, pleadings in cases) that can be used as teaching aids, and links to agency environmental databases; (d) Discussion lists - links to environmental law discussion lists for faculty and students; (e) Audio, Video and Speeches - links to speeches, conferences, symposia, and Supreme Court oral arguments that are available on the Web in audio or video format; (f) Faculty Course pages. The “Class Materials” category also includes a link to Mercer’s “Environmental Law Multi-School Virtual Guest Speaker / Discussion List Program,” which brings environmental law experts “virtually” to the web to present talks and participate on a discussion list with students at law schools in the U.S., China, and Israel.

The “Extracurriculars” category includes links to materials that faculty can use for student advisement, or for expanding the environmental law program at their school. The category includes: (a) Competitions - links to the environmental law writing, negotiations, and moot court competitions; (b) LL.M./Summer Programs - links to environmental law advanced degree and joint degree programs at other schools, and links to environmental law summer programs in the U.S. and abroad; (c) Environmental clinics - links to environmental law clinical programs; (d) Externships and Jobs - links to information about environmental law careers and externship opportunities; (e) Symposia and Conferences - links to environmental law symposia; and (f) Environmental Law reviews and Online articles.

The final category, “News,” includes links to daily or periodic environmental law or environmental news sites and links to other environmental law resource pages.

Although the ELTC focuses on environmental law, similar clearinghouses could be created for most other subject areas. Ideally, all of those clearinghouse could be linked from a single web site for law professors, either CALI (due to its focus on the use of computers in legal education), the Institute for Law Teaching at Gonzaga (due to its focus on improving law teaching), or JURIST (due to its status as a portal for law professors generally). JURIST is already beginning to move in this direction with the creation of subject guides. While these clearinghouses may not change the world, they can make everything that we do just a little easier.

© 1999 by Stephen Johnson. All rights reserved.
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The views expressed in this column are solely those of its author, and do not reflect those of JURIST, its Advisory Board, its staff or its host institutions.
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