The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published annually in an August issue of the Environmental Law Institute’s Environmental Law Reporter (ELR) in collaboration with Vanderbilt University Law School (VULS). Each year, Vanderbilt Law students work with an expert advisory committee, senior staff from ELI, and Vanderbilt Law professors to identify some of the year’s best academic articles that present creative and feasible legal and policy solutions to pressing environmental problems.
The first article in this year’s issue, Analysis of Environmental Law Scholarship 2023-2024, outlines the methodology for selecting articles and the number of articles considered. In addition, this year’s issue includes condensed versions of several select articles, along with commentaries from leading experts from law firms, businesses, government, and non-governmental organizations. The publication also includes a Top 20 Article Chart and abstracts from the Honorable Mention articles.
2025 Featured Articles
The 2025 issue features condensed versions of the following articles:
- Utilities with Purpose by Joel B. Eisen and Heather Payne
- Transitioning to Regenerative Agriculture One French Fry at a Time by Alexia Brunet Marks
- Disrupting Utility Law for Water Justice by Sharmila L. Murthy
- Soil Governance and Private Property by Sarah J. Fox
- The Greens’ Dilemma: Building Tomorrow’s Climate Infrastructure Today by J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman
Honorable Mentions
This year’s honorable mentions are:
- Turning Point: Green Industrial Policy and the Future of U.S. Climate Action? by Daniel Farber
- A Contractual Relationship with Environmental Justice by Seema Kakade
- Repurposing Fossil Infrastructure by Heather E. Payne
2025 ELPAR Events
This year ELPAR hosted three events to discuss the selected articles, including a public webinar and conferences in Nashville, TN and Washington, D.C.
The ELI webinar highlighted the article The Greens’ Dilemma: Building Tomorrow’s Climate Infrastructure Today. Co-authors J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman joined ELI staff and VULS law students to discuss the massive scale of new infrastructure urgently needed to meet U.S. greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. The authors propose a new approach that explicitly focuses on decarbonization and places speed and climate impact on par with (and potentially ahead of) conservation, distributional equity, and social justice. They suggest this can be accomplished by leveraging streamlining methods more “comprehensively” and “aggressively”—such as use of federal preemption, centralization of federal authority, establishment of strict timelines, and provision of more comprehensive and transparent information sources and access.
The ELPAR Nashville Conference featured Professor Sarah Fox’s article Soil Governance and Private Property that outlines the myriad environmental benefits that soil provides and proposes that soil should be treated as a common resource, similar to air and water. She posits that local governments are particularly well-situated to protect soil health in their land use planning by using tools such as zoning to restrict development in areas of high soil quality. Doug Berry, Of Counsel at Miller & Martin, and Scott Potter, Director of Metro Nashville Water Services, provided commentary and discussed the implications of Fox’s proposal.
The ELPAR Conference in Washington, D.C. featured three articles: Utilities with Purpose; Transitioning to Regenerative Agriculture One French Fry at a Time; and Disrupting Utility Law for Water Justice. The authors each presented summaries of their articles and leading practitioners and policymakers in the field provided comments, which comments are included in the 2025 ELPAR Publication. The conference was attended by a range of stakeholders, including federal agency staff, law firm associates and partners, and nonprofit leaders. Watch the recording of the 2025 ELPAR Conference here.
Learn More About ELPAR:
Listen to the podcast on last year’s ELPAR-selected article discussing how corporate-community agreements can be leveraged for environmental justice here.
Visit ELI’s ELPAR webpage here.