Environmental law

Environmental law - or "environmental and natural resources law" - is a collective term describing the network of treaties, statutes, regulations, and common and customary laws addressing the effects of human activity on the natural environment.

Regulatory subjects

The broad category of "environmental law" may be broken down into a number of more specific regulatory subjects. While there is no single agreed-upon taxonomy, the core environmental law regimes address environmental pollution. A related but distinct set of regulatory regimes, now strongly influenced by environmental legal principles, focus on the management of specific natural resources, such as forests, minerals, or fisheries. Other areas, such as environmental impact assessment, may not fit neatly into either category, but are nonetheless important components of environmental law.

Impact assessment

Environmental impact assessment (EA) is the term used for the assessment of the environmental consequences (positive and negative) of a plan, policy, program, or project prior to the decision to move forward with the proposed action. In this context, the term 'environmental impact assessment' (EIA) is usually used when applied to concrete projects and the term 'strategic environmental assessment' applies to policies, plans and programmes (Fischer, 2016). Environmental assessments may be governed by rules of administrative procedure regarding public participation and documentation of decision making, and may be subject to judicial review.

Cornell University

Cornell University (/kɔːrˈnɛl/ kor-NEL) is an American private Ivy League and federal land-grant research university located in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge — from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell's motto, a popular 1865 Ezra Cornell quotation: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its own admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar.

Cornell is one of three private land grant universities in the nation and the only one in New York. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its agricultural and veterinary colleges. As a land grant college, it operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Plantations (more than 4,300 acres) are considered, as well as the numerous university-owned lands in New York City.