OPINION/COMMENTARY

Environmentally Correct

Although he still considers himself an environmentalist, law professor David Schoenbrod’s [pictured] embrace of free market approaches to protecting the environment are viewed with suspicion in the halls of higher education. “There has been a real shift but it has not been pervasive,” says Dr. Schoenbrod, a law professor at New York University. Some noted liberals from academe have voiced agreement with some of Dr. Schoenbrod’s calls for market-based solutions to protecting the environment and giving back to states the authority to do so. Before he ascended to the Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer was one of these firebrands. Nonetheless, Dr. Schoenbrod admits that “the mass weight of academia” weighs in against ideas such as the ones he expresses in his new book, Saving Our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People (Yale University Press, 2005). “From the technical types I get agreement,” Dr. Schoenbrod told me at a recent seminar at the libertarian Cato Institute here in Washington, D. C. “From the law professors I get squeamishness.”....

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