ELC 2025: Reframing the Environmental Law Classroom Narrative by Laura Mott, Jessica Owley, and Leehi Yona
Every fall, many incoming law students arrive on campus with idealistic visions of changing the world. They may come filled with a passion for justice, environmental protection, human rights, or corporate reform. They want to think critically, tackle systemic problems, and make meaningful change. Then we hand them cases about foxes—or minimum contacts, or chickens—and spend lots of time on legal analysis fundamentals. Of course, the analytical framework of Issue, Rule, Application, and Conclusion is central to legal reasoning and law student learning; nurturing students’ ability to recognize, remember, and apply law is critical—much of the first year of law school is about building new neural pathways to facilitate complex legal reasoning. However, first-year students often struggle to square their classes with the immediate realities of our world, and with their “why” for coming to law school. Strengthening these connections— side-by-side with fundamentals—can harness students’ passions and foster engaged learning. Crucially, such a reframing of the law school narrative is also a powerful way for students to remain optimistic in turbulent times.
Without intentionally providing avenues for our students’ passion at the onset of their legal education, we risk both subduing the spirit that first drew them to law school and foreclosing opportunities for the next generation to develop creative and novel legal approaches. Two often-overlooked opportunities can help us in this effort: (1) incorporating storytelling in teaching and (2) expanding early pedagogical approaches, especially in the first year, beyond federal and common law paradigms.
Such cross-curricular strategies align with current trends and developments in legal education and licensure. Law school teaching is increasingly emphasizing experiential learning credits: the American Bar Association has proposed amending Standard 303 to double the required amount of experiential learning credits from 6 to 12. The NextGen bar exam will test foundational concepts (e.g. Contracts, Torts, Property, etc.) together, in an increasingly cross-doctrinal model, and with a greater emphasis on practice skills. Making connections between concepts in different doctrines and building a greater experiential foundation prepares students not only for academic and licensure success, but also for the realities of practice. This tees them up to make creative, holistic arguments, and prepares students for the diversity of pathways they may take after graduating.
The Power of Proactive Legal Narratives
Reactive storytelling has long dominated legal education. In environmental law, for example. we often traditionally teach doctrine through stories of disasters, failures, and conflicts. In an environmental law context, this method–without more–can embed the troubling assumption that law is primarily a tool for responding to crises – or at best preventing them. Law seeks to stop bad stuff, but are we reinforcing how it fosters good stuff?
The conservative legal movement is remarkably effective at storytelling—crafting compelling narratives of individual liberty, economic freedom, and constitutional originalism that resonate across decades and drive policy change. Meanwhile, progressive victories get lost in technical discussions of regulatory compliance or procedure. The problem isn’t that we’re not telling enough stories—it’s that we’re telling the wrong stories.
Consider an introductory Environmental Law class, where students frequently learn about the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) through cases where the process failed, or about climate change through litigation losses. Even Massachusetts v. EPA, the rare successful federal climate suit, is presented as a surprise win that most environmental groups expected to fail and whose success felt short lived. While these cases teach important doctrinal points, they subtly reinforce the idea that U.S. environmental law, while a huge legislative success at inception, has turned to playing defense, limiting damage, and fighting uphill battles.
But what if we flipped this narrative? What if we taught our environmental law courses with success stories as throughlines—laws that were passed proactively and are quietly doing good work every day? These proactive stories don't just have potential to inspire students; we can use them to teach deeper legal practice skills. Instead of learning only how to spot violations and craft remedies, students may benefit if their knowledge of these laws develops concurrently with instruction on how to design effective policies, buildcoalitions, and create implementation systems. They can continue the real-world momentum that brought many of them into law school and foster students’ instincts to use the law as a tool for building the world we want, not just fixing the world we have. Of course, we can’t just teach the successes, but with powerful stories underlying the approach students may be more inspired to think creatively and see potential for change.
Introducing success narratives early in legal education supports powerful, positively- anchored and strongly scaffolded instruction. If students encounter their first cases about environmental protection through stories of innovative policy solutions and creative leaders rather than ecological disasters and retrenchment, they are primed to develop a fundamentally different relationship with the field—one with more possibilities than limitations, and one that models the importance of innovative and creative leadership. This initial framing can become the lens through which they view subsequent material, approaching legal problems as opportunities for creative problem-solving rather than damage control.
Breaking the Federal Law Bubble
The second major limitation in traditional legal education is its practice of focusing primarily on federal law (and secondarily on state common law). This might seem natural—federal cases create binding precedent, federal agencies have broad regulatory power, and federal courts handle many high-profile disputes. But this focus risks creating a tilted picture of how law operates in practice.
For many areas of law in which students are most interested, the most important developments happen at state, local, or international levels. The typical first-year curriculum, however, might treat these other sources as peripheral curiosities rather than integral parts of the legal system. Common law courses like torts and contracts, which primarily use state law to teach the evolution of foundational concepts, may relegate federal or international law in opinions. Students often graduate believing international law is somehow less “real” than domestic law, despite the fact that international agreements shape everything from trade policy to human rights protections. In fact, there are strong arguments that international law is a part of U.S. law. This omission forecloses the opportunity to engage in a rich “sources of law” discussion where students have opportunities to compare U.S. common law and international customary law and build a deeper understanding of the development and functionality of juridical systems.
Students need to understand that these pathways exist, rather than assuming federal court silence means legal irrelevance. The positive scaffolding effect of this broader exposure cannot be overstated. Students who learn from the beginning that legal problems routinely cross jurisdictional boundaries develop “jurisdictional fluency”—the instinct to consider multiple legal frameworks when approaching any issue. This early anchoring might shift their entire approach to legal practice by providing them with tools to develop a more expansive “theory of the case”— in turn making them more effective advocates and more sophisticated legal thinkers.
Toward Inspiring, Holistic Legal Education
These two reforms—incorporating proactive narratives and expanding beyond and across federal and U.S. common law—share a collective goal: helping students see law as a dynamic, creative, and globally connected enterprise rather than a narrow, reactive, and parochially American one. Both reforms acknowledge that effective legal practice requires not just analytic skills but also imagination, empathy, and strategic thinking.
Consider again how these approaches might work together in practice. A constitutional law class could explore how other democracies and U.S. states have designed constitutional systems to promote rather than merely protect rights—showing students proactive constitutional design rather than just defensive constitutional litigation. An environmental law class could structure a unit around examining how international environmental agreements create frameworks for domestic innovation rather than focusing solely on domestic enforcement failures. And demonstrating how local governments are vital actors in an introductory environmental law course exposes students to the type of government rules and agencies they are most likely to interact with as lawyers and as community members.
The goal of our suggestions is emphatically not to abandon rigor or critical analysis. IRAC remains essential, federal law remains important, and students still need to understand how legal systems respond to failures and conflicts. These traditional elements, though, can be part of a richer educational experience that also shows students how law can be proactive, creative, and internationally engaged.
The students who arrive each fall with dreams of changing the world aren't naive—they're prescient. Law is one of the most powerful tools for social change, policy innovation, and global cooperation. Rather than immediately redirecting that energy toward siloed topics, perhaps we should show them how topics connect, and how diversifying their legal skill set can serve their broader ambitions. We should show them how law operates across multiple levels and jurisdictions, not just in federal courts. We should help them see legal practice as an opportunity for creative problem-solving, not just dispute resolution. We should tell them stories of legal success, not just legal failure.
Legal education at its best should inspire as well as inform. When we combine rigorous training in analysis with proactive narratives and global perspectives, we prepare students not just to practice law, but to practice law with vision, creativity, and hope. That's the kind of legal education our students deserve—and the kind our profession needs.
This post reflects ongoing conversations about legal pedagogy and draws inspiration from colleagues across multiple institutions who are experimenting with these and other innovative approaches to legal education.
Laura Mott is an Assistant Professor of Law at Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law.
Jessica Owley is a Professor of Law and Environmental Law Program Director at the University of Miami School of Law.
Leehi Yona is an Assistant Professor of Law and Gearns & Russo Faculty Fellow of Environmental Law at Cornell Law School.