Environmental Precedent: Foregrounding the Environmental Consequences of Law in Sociology

The central premise of environmental sociology is that social and environmental processes influence one another in fundamental ways. Here we build upon that insight and develop the concept of “environmental precedent” to better incorporate the full range of environmentally consequential law - even law that is not “environmental” per se - in sociological analysis. Environmental precedent refers to the environmental consequences of legal processes, consequences that become the new, enduring, dynamic material reality for future legal processes. Unlike legal precedent, which may be amended to suit immediate needs through judicial or legislative action, environmental precedent can have interpretive and material consequences that may be impossible for any social process to predict, amend, or reverse. To demonstrate the concept’s usefulness, we illustrate the varied, dialectical environmental and legal relationships that exist in three case studies; the Flint water crisis, the federal passage of a suite of environmental laws in the early 1970s, and how some preconditions to the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina came to pass in New Orleans. In addition to foregrounding the benefits to sociology of a sharper understanding of environmental legal theory and practice, our aim is to encourage collaboration between social scientists, environmental lawyers, and legal scholars.