Pathway to Reframing Environmental Law

Abstract

This arti cle provides a diagnostic of a major structural problem of environmental law before suggesting a way lo adess it. The problem is that environmental law, even avant la le/Ire, was and remains designed as a law of negative externaliti es- a body of laws fundamentally organized so as lo minimize interference with the underlying transaction while mitigating its negative externalities. This article proposes instead lo reframe environmental law not as the expression of allocative efficiency but as a means of steering socio-economic processes in directions that are more likely to avoid an irreversible change in Earth System dynamics.