ELP STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP

Students in the Environmental Law Program have a variety of opportunities to publish their scholarship -- in law reviews, in newsletters, through the ELP's He Mau Mo`olelo Kanawai o Ka `Aina publication series, or "online" via this web page. Whatever your interest, there doors are open to students seeking to improve their writing skills, add to the community's knowledge base, and even influence policy.


LAW REVIEWS
Many ELP students have published important papers in the University of Hawai`i Law Review and in other student-edited law reviews. Stay tuned here for a sample of those publications.


OTHER OPPORTUNITIES for getting published:

3 Annual Hawaii Conservation Conference

ELP STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE
With the assistance of a generous grant from the Pohaku Fund of the Tides Foundation, ELP is pleased to periodically publish student papers on-line. We hope you enjoy reading these excellent student papers written for Environmental Law courses at the Law School, e-published for the enrichment of scholars, practitioners, and other interested members of the environmental law community. Below you will find selected papers from the Fall 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002 classes. Stay tuned for more papers in the future.

FALL 2005

FALL 2001/FALL 2002

Critique of Executive Order 12898: Fictitious Environmental Justice Forum

Analysis of Section Four of the Endangered Species Act as an Offensive Tool in the Conservation of Endangered Species on Private Land as Illustrated by Recovery Efforts for the `Alala

FALL 2000

Should a Native Hawaiian Right To Take Green Sea Turtles Be Recognized Under the Federal Endangered Species Act

How Do Universities Comply with RCRA?: The Storage of Hazardous Waste on the University of Hawai'i Campus

Permits Under Section 301(h) of the Clean Water Act and the Sand Island Waste Water Treatment Plant: A Case Study

FALL 1999

A Thousand Paper Cranes: An End to the Nuclear Crisis

The Casey Jarman Law Review Mini-Symposium (April 1, 2000)

The Clean Water Act in Crooked Creek

The Eagle's Disease

Fall 2001 and 2002 Papers Issue: Critiquing Executive Order 12898 and
Rescuing the Critically Endangered `Alala (Hawaiian Crow)

Kathryn Lehua Opedal’s paper was written for Professor Jarman’s 2001 Environmental Law class. She successful took on the challenge of critiquing President Clinton’s Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice. Using a fictitious Environmental Justice forum with panelists Davianna Pomaika`i McGregor, Associate Professor for the University of Hawai`i’s Ethnic Studies Department and noted scholar of Native Hawaiian culture; Professor Robert Bullard, scholar and pioneer of the environmental justice movement; David Foreman, cofounder of Earthfirst!; and former President Clinton, Lehua explored the strengths and weaknesses of the Executive Order. Click here to read Lehua's work.

Erin Ching’s paper, “Analysis of Section Four of the Endangered Species Act as an Offensive Tool in the Conservation of Endangered Species on Private Land as Illustrated by Recovery Efforts for the `Alala,” was written for Professor Antolini’s 2002 Environmental Law class. In her paper, Erin (Class of '04) analyzes the real world relationship between environmental law and the `Alala (Hawaiian Crow), one of the world’s most critically endangered species. By carefully examining the history of a novel federal Endangered Species Act lawsuit brought in the early 1990s by environmental groups that attempted to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to carry out Section 4 recovery efforts on private ranchland, Erin seeks to determine whether the law has made a meaningful contribution to the recovery of the crow. Nationwide, about 90% of endangered species occur on private land, and in Hawai`i the rate is about 50%. Thus, the ability of the federal government to intervene to protect species on private lands is a pressing environmental law issue. Looking at the still perilous situation of the `Alala, Erin concludes that litigation has played a useful role in protecting the crow, but that substantially more scientific effort and resources are needed in bring the crow back from the brink of extinction.

The `Alala (Hawaiian Crow)

Fall 2000 Papers Issue: Hawaii Case Studies -- Turtles, Hazardous Waste, and Sewage Plants

The latest issue of Student Scholarship Online features three papers written for Assistant Professor Denise Antolini's Fall 2000 Environmental Law course. For this class, students wrote scholarly papers on a current environmental law topic of their choice that analyzed the application of a major federal environmental law to a Hawaii problem. The pedagogical benefits of this "case study" approach are significant particularly in a survey course like Environmental Law, which presents the professor with the enormous challenge of teaching students a field of law in which the number of statutes and regulations surpass the tax code! The case study approach invites the students to examine one or more of these complex statutes in a deeper and more contextual way than allowed by a case-book discussion.

The case study assignment also allowed the students to choose from a wide variety of timely and "hot" Hawaii topics that have direct relevance to them personally and professionally. The case study also encouraged students to go beyond the thick casebook and cold library, and engage themselves directly in on-the-ground research on the people, places, and policies that are the real-world context for environmental law in Hawaii. As a result, they interviewed policymakers, planners, attorneys, landowners, managers, activists -- giving them the true flavor of what it is like to work in the field and making valuable career connections. The students' enthusiasm for their projects generated excellent scholarship and the Environmental Law Program is delighted to share their hard work with the broader community.

The first paper, entitled "Should a Native Hawaiian Right to Take Green Sea Turtles Be Recognized Under the Endangered Species Act" was written by Leighton M. Hara (Class of '02). Mr. Hara's paper addresses the complex nature of the arguments for a native Hawaiian "cultural take" of the threatened Green Sea Turtle within the current framework of the federal Endangered Species Act.

The second paper, authored by Jamie Tanabe (Class of '02) and entitled "How Do Universities Comply with RCRA?: The Storage of Hazardous Waste on the University of Hawai'i Campus," examines the recent enforcement order against the University of Hawaii for violations of hazardous waste laws. Ms. Tanabe explores the unique challenges that face large educational institutions like the University of Hawaii in complying with the federal statutory scheme called RCRA (Resource Recovery and Conservation Act), which is aimed primarily at the hazardous waste storage and disposal problems of private corporations.

In the third paper, "Permits Under Section 301(h) of the Clean Water Act and the Sand Island Waste Water Treatment Plant: A Case Study," Dan Davidson (Class of '02) takes a fresh look at the long-running controversy over the proper level of sewage treatment provided by O`ahu's Sand Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. Mr. Davidson analyzes the application of the Clean Water Act's national removal standards to the Plant and comments on whether the Plant should continue to have a waiver to operate below the secondary level of treatment.

Fall 1999 Papers Issue: New Approaches to Learning Environmental Law - Critique through Creative Writing

For the first issue of ELP Student Scholarship Online, we published five papers written for Professor Jarman's Fall 1999 Environmental Law survey course. These papers are unique among law student papers because the assignment permitted students to engage in creative writing rather than traditional legal writing such as memoranda of law, briefs, or law review papers. The assignment required the students to critique an environmental law doctrine, case, statute, regulation, or treaty from a specific point of view. Students were encouraged to read widely the works of authors whose point of view they chose. They were told to use the literary vehicle of their choosing to present their critiques.

The idea to encourage students to analyze the law using non-legal literary formats came from years of listening (with chagrin) to law students complain that law school drained away their creative energies. Many law students feel constrained by the rigidity of the legal memorandum and brief formats and long for an opportunity to express their newfound knowledge in ways that will tap their own creativity. As a secondary benefit, use of short stories, essays, children’s stories, and plays to convey information about the law makes the law more accessible and interesting to non-lawyer audiences, as well as legally trained audiences.

Asking students to critique the law from a perspective other than their own has presented interesting challenges for the students. They often find they need to learn a "new language" as they delve into unfamiliar worlds such as ecophilosphy, economics, and nuclear energy. They experience the difficulties inherent in stepping out of one’s own voice and attempting to speak through the voice of another. In addition, most students report that while they eventually can master the art of critiquing through another’s world view, they find it extremely difficult to amend or craft new laws/doctrines that can respond positively to the critique while simultaneously balancing the myriad of interests that environmental law must serve. But all report that the experience broadened their perspectives and forced them to acknowledge the complexities inherent in environmental law.

The first paper, entitled "A Thousand Paper Cranes: An End to the Nuclear Crisis" is authored by Nichole Shimamoto (class of ‘01). Nicole is a member of the law school’s highly successful Jessup International Moot Court Team, co-editor in chief of the 2000-2001 University of Hawai´i Law Review, and one of the winners of the first annual John S. Edmunds Award for Civility and Vigorous Advocacy. Nicole’s story beautifully interweaves the views of physician and anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott with the voice of Sadako, a young girl who died of leukemia forty-five years ago (a disease she contracted following the U.S. nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima), and her own voice as she struggles to come to terms with nuclear energy, and more particularly, Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which establishes a "right" to nuclear technology).

The second paper, "The Casey Jarman Law Review Mini-Symposium (April 1, 2000)," is a combined submission by Jean Campbell (class of ‘00) and Adrienne Yoshihara (class of ‘00), both members of the 1999-2000 editorial board of the University of Hawai´i Law Review. Jean, an environmental certificate recipient, received a 1999-2000 Pohaku Fund Travel Grant to the Western Public Interest Environmental Law Conference at the University of Oregon Law School where she presented her paper, Where’s the Beach?: Drawing a Line in the Sand to Determine Shoreline Property Boundaries in the United States and the Resulting Conflict Between Public and Private Interests, on a panel with two other University of Hawai´i law students. For their Environmental Law class project, Adrienne and Jean created a mini-symposium of a fictitious law review in which they present a critique of western water policy from the points of view of Professor Garrett Hardin, biologist and author of the highly influential article, "Tragedy of the Commons" and Marc Riesner, a western water expert who wrote The Cadillac Desert, a highly acclaimed history of U.S. western water policy. In the first "article", "Damn Those Dams", Jean constructs a conversation about western water policy between Garrett Hardin and Marc Riesner at a chance meeting in Eugene, Oregon, a few days before the 2000 Western Public Interest Law Conference. In the second "article", Adrienne creates a transcript of a fictional December 1, 1999 meeting of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources where Professor Hardin has been invited to comment on President Clinton’s recently submitted western water policy proposal.

The third paper, "The Clean Water Act in Crooked Creek", written by Teri Barnett (class of ‘01), is a children’s story about the Clean Water Act told from the perspective of animals that live in a wooded area along Crooked Creek. Teri, who balances the responsibilities of law school with those of raising two young children and preparing for the arrival of her third child, wrote this story for her five-year old daughter Kayle. Through her story, Teri has demonstrated that environmental law can come alive for people of all ages, including pre-schoolers!

The final paper, "The Eagle’s Disease", is a moving and suspenseful short story written by Jan David Breemer (class of ‘01) who is member of the University of Hawai´i Law Review and a candidate for the environmental law certificate. In his story, David takes a critical look at the Endangered Species Act from three perspectives: Ron Arnold, founder of the Wise Use Movement, who is cast as a western rancher; Dave Forman, one of the founders of EarthFirst!, who appears in the story as a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and a composite of himself and people he knew while growing up in the foothills of the Sierra mountains in California, represented in the story by an old man who owns property where eagles come to play and feed.

Request ELP Brochure or Law School Application / Contact Information
Law School Home Page / Site Map