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celebrating was the phenomenal growth of student concern for the environment. NAELS had been founded
in 1988, when the University of Michigan's Environmental Law Society invited students from other law
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schools to a conference on environmental law. The conference organizers were astounded when nearly 200
students from 51 law schools responded to their invitation to what became the first NAELS conference. In
the five years since that conference, student interest in environmental law has grown into a catalyst for
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change in legal education. Environmental law is now capturing a prominent place in law school curricula.
In a sharp departure from legal education's traditional resistance to specialization, many law schools are
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creating specialized environmental programs and offering concentrations or advanced degrees in
environmental law. These changes in legal education are likely to affect greatly the next generation of
environmental professionals.
I The Rise of Student Interest
2.
It is not hard to find signs of the surge in student interest in environmental law. Anyone who teaches
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in the field can confirm that its popularity has increased dramatically in recent years. Surveys by the author
and by the American Association of Law School's (AALS's) section on environmental law have shown that
this surge is having a huge impact on the curricula of law schools nationwide. The basic environmental law
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course, formerly considered a specialty offering that may have attracted some 30 to 40 students, is now
viewed at most schools as an essential element of the mainstream curriculum, and it frequently attracts
more than 100 students. Most law schools now offer several environmental courses, and many are
expanding their environmental offerings.
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3. Before examining these changes in detail, it is important to consider what is generating the surge in
student interest in environmental law. Much of it is a product of the rapid growth in federal environmental
regulation, which has expanded the demand for environmental lawyers. When Congress
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established the first national regulatory programs to protect the environment in the early 1970s-including
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970, the 1970 amendments to the Clean Air Act, the
Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control
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Act of 1972, the Ocean Dumping Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the Safe Drinking
Water Act of 1974-a new legal specialty was born for which few practicing lawyers were well prepared.
This void generated an initial burst of growth in environmental education in law schools (see Figure 1 on
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page 224). For example, the AALS directories show that, between 1971 and 1975, law schools increased
their environmental course offerings by 52 percent (from 111 to 169) and the number of fulltime faculty
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teaching such courses rose 47 percent (from 109 to 160). As environmental law matured and businesses
became more accustomed to regulation, the impact of the initial surge in demand for environmental
lawyers lessened. Between 1975 and 1986, the number of environmental courses in law schools declined
slightly, as many specialized seminars became regular environmental courses.