Environmental Law
Today's children grow up with a keen sense of environmental issues. Grade school children participate in community efforts to clean up creeks and rivers and spend class time studying the causes of global warming. Preschoolers, coached by sophisticated teachers as well as a certain purple dinosaur, remind family members to recycle. The parents of these savvy kids-whose own childhood knowledge of environmental issues may have been limited to planting a tree in the schoolyard on Arbor Day-find themselves facing an ever increasing array of environmental challenges in the workplace. Whether employed in real estate, manufacturing, construction, banking, or health care, they grapple with environmental issues, many of which touch upon the law.
Environmental law is a relatively new legal specialty. Since the 1970s-often referred to as "the environmental decade"-the U.S. Congress has passed a number of major environmental statutes. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal agencies have adopted hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations under those statutes. State and local governments have also enacted regulations in response to environmental concerns. Thus a vast range of environmental issues intersects with the law-from the generation and disposal of hazardous waste to the transfer of property that may be contaminated to the protection of land, water, and air from future contamination.
Reproduced from The Official Guide to Legal Specialties with permission. (c) 2000 Thomson Reuters/West. For additional information on this publication please visit 
http://west.thomson.com/products/law-students. Copyright granted via e-mail by Donna Gies, September 16, 2008.