The ABA Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources is committed to providing members with opportunities to enhance professional skills, remain current on issues and to promote dialogue in these substantive areas. It represents more than 10,000 members with a wide range of professional interests. The Section keeps its members abreast of development trends, current court decisions, legislative initiatives, and statutes concerning environmental, natural resources, and energy law.

To further our purposes, the Law Student Programs Committee is excited to extend an opportunity to law students to publish their works on our Section website. Nominations should be submitted to the ABA no later than February 8, 2008. The Committee is conducting a nationwide search of Spring 2008 environment/energy/resource seminar classes to find outstanding papers that deserve to be published. Many of today's students are at the forefront of critical thinking in environmental law. Unfortunately, as there are so few opportunities for students to publish, many well written manuscripts are never shared with the wider audience that would benefit from these students' creativity. The Committee would like to foster new opportunities by giving students a new forum to publish. Last year’s winners were the University of Denver, Pace University, and Wayne State University. Also, one of the 2007 papers was chosen for publication in a forthcoming issue of Natural Resources and Environment.

We encourage you to distribute copies of the rules and nomination form to relevant faculty. Please provide this information to the ABA no later than February 8, 2008. Based on these submittals, by March 5, 2008 the Committee will select up to three seminar classes for publication and notify those selected. When the Professor of each of the selected classes grades the papers at the end of the semester, he or she will choose the top five papers and submit those to the Committee in electronic format, along with completed copyright release forms. The Committee will publish up to nine papers on the Section's Law Student Web Pages. The Committee also will share these papers with the Section's substantive committees to allow the widest dissemination of the students' work.

This project should not impose any additional burden on your students, but is intended to provide an additional reward for their already outstanding writing. If you have any questions, please e-mail me at james.stuhltrager@us.army.mil or call at (410) 436-1554.

Sincerely,
James M. Stuhltrager
Chair, Law Student Programs Committee