The Constitution contains no textual support for environmental protection’s core aims

Evidence

Further structural obstacles to the development of a legal regime for environmental protection are rooted in various preferences expressed by the Constitution. Environmental law is wholly lacking in a constitutional foundation because its tendency is to challenge rather than to find support in constitutional doctrine and preferences. These preferences all reflect the need to prevent governmental overreaching in general. Several, moreover, are more directly premised on the presumptive need to protect the operation of free market forces—especially private property rights and freedom of contract—from governmental interference. Missing from the constitutional scheme is any explicit endorsement of the legitimacy of environmental law’s core objective to fundamentally redefine the relationship between humankind and the natural environment. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Gives students a clean hook for the LGST course: the Bill of Rights is built to restrain government, so a legal regime built on government restraint of private actors runs against the constitutional grain. — connects to: The dormant Commerce Clause bars states from protecting ecosystems against out-of-state harms — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 198; No federal constitutional environmental-justice claim has ever prevailed — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 573
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source