Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

The United States government holds 600 million acres of land, roughly one third of the country, as public land. As we now understand it, the promise of this land is simple and deeply rooted in our national psyche: parts of the continent should be open space, and that open space should be open to the public. But what to do with this land—how we should use or preserve it, and even whether the federal government should hold onto it—is more complicated. In 1970, a congressionally appointed Public Land Law Review Commission released a report investigating these questions. That report took “the year 2000” as “the limit of its ‘foreseeable future.’” So, it is past time to ask these questions again. They are particularly pressing now. For the first time since the Public Land Law Review Commission met, Congress has seriously floated selling large portions of federal public land. The Bureau of Land Management has embarked on a major sale of oil and gas leases across the western United States. Congress has used the Congressional Review Act to rescind various resource management plans developed by federal agencies. And federal agencies have themselves rescinded rules permitting “conservation leasing” on federal public land and announced plans to review their enforcement of wilderness designations.

This reading group invites you to imagine the future of federal public land law. We will focus on statutes and administrative documents, familiarizing ourselves with existing statutory language so that we can envision new statutes. We will pair this reading with philosophical and literary texts, as well as some caselaw, that help us understand what public land is and might be. Our work together will culminate in an in-class exercise in which we will sketch the new or amended statutes that should govern our federal public land. We will meet for six two-hour sessions, and participation will be graded credit/fail.

Note: This reading group will meet on the following dates: TBD.