Searching for Intergenerational Green Solutions: The Relevance of the Public Trust Doctrine to Environmental Preservation

Abstract:     
In the Common Law jurisprudence, a trust is "the legal relationship between one person having an equitable ownership in property and another person owning the legal title to such property." In the context of the Public Trust Doctrine, the legal title is vested in the state and the equitable title in the public. Thus the state is responsible as trustee to manage the property in the interest of the public. The PTD has been praised by the environmentalist community as "the most promising legal basis upon which individual members of the public could maintain a lawsuit to protect natural resources from needless degradation and destruction." In contrast, critics contend that it is "more rhetorically than legally charged." The purpose of this article is to assess the relevance of the PTD to environmental protection.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 7

Keywords: Public Trust Doctrine, Environmental Law, US Law

JEL Classification: K32, K33

Accepted Paper Series