In 2003, the Environmental Law Institute launched the Endangered Environmental Laws Program to help ensure the ongoing constitutional legitimacy of environmental protection. We inform public debate about the constitutional foundations of environmental law through a comprehensive agenda of legal research, education, and outreach. Our Program attorneys—

• Shape the legal debate on environmental law by publishing and disseminating legal scholarship and analyses that fill research gaps and give traction to new arguments in the federal courts.

• Reach out to policymakers, lawyers, and scholars to publicize and explain novel constitutional arguments that threaten environmental law—and to make the affirmative case on behalf of the proven legal framework for environmental protection.

• Educate and inform journalists and their audiences, focusing attention on the harmful consequences of attacks on environmental law and on the implications, both good and bad, of precedent-setting court rulings on constitutional issues.

• Support a coalition of progressive organizations working to safeguard and advance environmental and other federal rights.

• Serve as a resource on judicial nominations and matters of judicial accountability by researching and analyzing the environmental records of federal judicial nominees and by exploring the relationship between judges’ political party affiliations and the outcomes of environmental cases.

• Engage the current generation of law students and the next generation of law clerks on the fundamental threat to environmental and other federal rights that is posed by the anti-regulatory movement.