We welcome model or draft laws by law professors or law students to implement one or more recommendations in Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization. Law student work can provide an important point of departure for considering and enacting laws. It also provides students with an invaluable opportunity to make a contribution while they are still in law school, and a bridge between legal education and legal practice.
To get started, send Rick Horsch a note identifying the recommendations that a particular student or class will be writing about. The recommendations in the Legal Pathways chapters identified here are still available. He can then tell you whether he has received any other expressions of interest in the recommendation(s) you have identified.
We will post completed model laws with supporting memoranda by law students that their law professor believes are of sufficiently high quality to be posted on the website, which also contains peer-reviewed work prepared by professionals. Our thinking is that this law student work could be utilized at least initially by policymakers and practitioners. Professors participating in this endeavor should select those student model laws and supporting memoranda that the professor deems final and publishable, and that incorporate the professor’s edits and comments. Professors should then send the selected model laws and supporting memoranda to Rick Horsch at richard.horsch@lpdd.org. Please include a note from the student(s) granting us permission to publish. When we publish law student work, we will identify the name of the student(s), their law school, and the name of the law professor who supervised the work. We will also include a note explaining that, while the paper has not been subject to the LPDD peer review process, it nonetheless provides valuable background information and is a point of departure in considering and enacting laws.
Professors are, of course, more than welcome to draft model laws themselves for this project. They should first contact Rick Horsch about which recommendation(s) they wish to take on.