Spring 2025
Professor(s):
Joseph Sanders (FACULTY)
Credits: 3
Course Areas: Energy, Natural Resources and Environmental Law
Health Law
Time: 10:30a-12:00p TTH Location: 312
Course Outline: This course strives to give students an overview of the law of environmental and toxic torts. It includes cases in which there is a personal injury or property damage due to exposure to toxic substances, including drugs. It combines a historic overview of the field with coverage of the current issues confronting the courts and Congress.
The legal system’s response to these substances is both proactive and retroactive. Statutes such as the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) seek to prevent injury by assessing a drug’s safety before permitting it to be marketed and by regulating the handling of hazardous waste. Common law torts suits sounding in negligence, products liability, nuisance, trespass, and strict liability for abnormally dangerous activities – provide potential redress for injuries caused by toxic substances and drugs and as do statutes such as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which seeks to ensure that sites that have been contaminated are cleaned up to safe standards. This course explores both responses within the context of private tort law and statutes.
Course Syllabus: Syllabus
Course Notes: (Face-to-Face) The UH registration system instruction mode for this course is listed in parenthesis. For this instruction mode, instructors and students are expected to normally be physically present in the classroom. If the course has a final examination, it will be in a classroom requiring your physical presence. Other assessment, such as a mid-term exam, may also be in a classroom. Whether this instructor will offer “remote presence” (starting a zoom meeting from the podium computer to enable student remote access on an occasional basis) for part or all of the semester is not known, but students should not rely on an expectation that remote presence will be available.
Prerequisites:
First Day Assignments:
Final Exam Schedule: 5/8/2025 9-12pm
This course will have:
Exam:
Paper:
Satisfies Senior Upper Level Writing Requirement: No
Experiential Course Type: No
Bar Course: No
DistanceEd ABA: No
Pass-Fail Student Election: Unavailable (Instructor Preference)
Course Materials
Book(s) Required
Course Materials: Casebook (Craig, et el., Toxic and Environmental Torts (2d ed.) (West, 2024) is the primary material for the course.
