Environmental Law

Environmental law is a body of law , which is a system of complex and interlocking statutes, common law, treaties, conventions, regulations and policies which seeks to protect the natural environment which may be affected, impacted or endangered by human activities. Some environmental laws regulate the quantity and nature of impacts of human activities: for example, setting allowable levels of pollution . Other environmental laws are preventive in nature and seek to assess the possible impacts before the human activities can occur. This area of law is sometimes known as environmental impact assessment . Environmental law is practiced in the public interest, by groups and individuals seeking environmental protections for general public benefit, but it is mostly practiced in the private interest, by groups and individuals that undertake polluting or environmentally destructive activities, and who seek to avoid violating environmental laws in the process.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1970 along with the Environmental Quality Improvement Act, the Environmental Education Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The main objective of these federal enactments was to assure that the environment be protected against both public and private actions that failed to take account of costs or harms inflicted on the eco-system.

The EPA was supposed to monitor and analyze the environment, conduct research, and work closely with state and local governments to devise pollution control policies. NEPA (really enacted in 1969) has been described as one of Congress's most far reaching environmental legislation ever passed. The basic purpose of NEPA is to force governmental agencies to consider the effects on the environment of their decisions.

State laws also reflect the same concerns and common law actions in nuisance allow adversely affected property owners to seek a judicial remedy for environtal harms.