Читать книгу The Psychology of Environmental Law - Arden Rowell - Страница 11

Environmental law scholars have long argued that environmental law is distinctive, and that failing to appreciate that distinctiveness can lead legal decision makers into error, by obscuring the ways in which environmental injury operates differently than other types of legally cognizable injury. We build on those claims here to argue that environmental law is also psychologically distinctive and that failing to appreciate the psychological distinctiveness of environmental injury can also undermine legal decision making. A psychology of environmental law should account for these distinctive characteristics, while respecting the normative goals and institutional constraints through which environmental law and policy is created and enforced.

What makes environmental law environmental? We begin the chapter by summarizing legal scholarship that explores what makes environmental law distinctive. In doing so, we draw particularly on the well-known work of Richard Lazarus in articulating the important characteristics of environmental harms. This line of scholarship will be familiar to environmental scholars, though it may be new to readers coming from law and psychology. In sum, that work suggests that harms to the environment tend to involve a set of characteristics that are otherwise unusual within law, and that legal institutions and legal decision makers need to recognize what makes environmental injury distinctive in order to effectuate their ends. In some cases, Lazarus and other scholars even call for structural, institutional, or doctrinal changes in environmental law to allow for more effective management of environmental injury. By the end of this part of the chapter, it should be clear (if it is not already) that the characteristics of environmental injury matter, and that understanding and addressing those characteristics helps determine whether environmental laws can achieve their ends.

The chapter then highlights where recognized characteristics of environmental injury match with influential bodies of research in psychology—that is, we describe what is distinctively psychological about environmental law. Many of the characteristics that make environmental injury distinctive also implicate distinctive psychological phenomena, and understanding those phenomena can help in crafting, enforcing, and understanding the impact of laws that seek to manage environmental injury. In particular, as we will develop further throughout the remainder of the book, the distinctively diffuse, complex, and nonhuman character of environmental injury has psychological as well as legal implications, and trying to tease out the legal implications without considering the psychology creates a needless handicap in developing effective legal regimes.

Finally, we discuss the law part of the psychology of environmental law. This begins with an overview of the origins and history of environmental law. We then discuss two key features of environmental law that are important for lawyers to recognize and psychologists to understand. First, we explain that, unlike psychology, environmental law is normative. That is, it does take a position on what is good versus bad, worth preserving versus safe to dispose of, and so on. This normative dimension motivates action and activism in the field, and determines the goals that environmental laws seek to achieve. Second, we note that environmental law is institutional. That is, environmental law has purchase via the multiple legal institutions responsible for creating, enforcing, and interpreting it, as well as via individual decision making. Psychologists, who are more prone to thinking about how people operate individually, or in dyads or small groups, must remember that the law operates through institutional actors of various stripes (including individuals!) who are constrained and enabled by their roles.