Welcome
The Center for Global Energy, International Arbitration, and Environmental Law at The University of Texas School of Law offers an extensive and unique curriculum to students interested in these areas of the law. The Center is also a focal point for interdisciplinary analysis, debate, and discussion of the legal and policy issues relevant to energy, arbitration, and the environment.
New in 2012: HOT NEW COURSES
Oil and Gas Taxation
Oil and Gas Taxation covers the United States federal income taxation of domestic oil and gas operations and transactions. The course examines taxation associated with the operational life cycle of oil and gas operations including exploration, development, production and abandonment. The study of transactions involving oil and gas interests analyzes acquisition, disposition, structuring and investment. Course participants learn the historical context and developement of oil and gas provisions found in the U.S. tax law.
Global Energy Transactions
This three credit, multidisciplinary, course focuses on identifying, understanding and developing strategies for the numerous legal, geoscience and commercial/economic issues that arise in the context of selecting, funding, developing, operating and decommissioning an international oil and gas project. Students will have the opportunity to examine and solve “real world” problems that arise in the context of international energy investments.
Environmental Policy and Law
This course is about environmental law, a subject that necessarily includes consideration of environmental science, environmental economics, and environmental policy as essential elements of its analysis. In addition to teaching about the substance of the laws pertaining to the environment, the course pursues a broader goal of teaching about how the legal system functions in an area of vital public concern.
Coastal Watersheds
This course fosters an integrated understanding of the science, law and policy relating to issues such as land use, water use, and climate change in coupled watershed-coastal ocean systems. The course is interdisciplinary and listed in both the Law School and the Department of Marine Science. There are three major course components: (1) topical lectures, (2) literature discussions, and (3) case studies.
UPCOMING CONFERENCE
“Trading Places” Property Rights and Human Rights Agenda Conference
The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas School of Law is pleased to announce its eighth annual conference, to take place March 1-2, 2012. The conference is free and open to the public. Registration is strongly encouraged.
For many social movements throughout the world, the question today is not whether there is or should be a human right to property, but what type of property—individual/collective, formal/customary, public/private—international and domestic rights regimes should facilitate.
This multidisciplinary and comparative conference seeks to explore these conflicting trends, in the hope of uncovering hidden assumptions, learning from varied experiences, and exploring which property regimes might best advance the human rights agenda in each context. Conference panels will explore topics such as changing conceptions of property, the role of property rights in dispossession and redistribution, and the implications of private titling.
Some of the speakers include: Carol Rose, a professor of law at Yale Law School where she teaches classes on environmental law, natural resources law, property, land use, and intellectual property law; David Kennedy, Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School; and Gerald Torres, a professor and Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law. He teaches classes on environmental law, Indian law, property, and water law.
The event is co-sponsored by The Center for Global Energy, International Arbitration, and Environmental Law, the Department of Government, The Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, the South Asia Institute, the School of Law, and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, all at the University of Texas, and by the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.
UPCOMING COMPETITION
The Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot
In April the UT Law Energy Center will send a team of students to compete in the The Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot. Last year there were 240 law schools from 90+ countries around the world represented!
The goal of the Vis Arbitral Moot is to foster the study of international commercial law and arbitration for resolution of international business disputes through its application to a concrete problem of a client and to train law leaders of tomorrow in methods of alternative dispute resolution.
The Moot involves a dispute arising out of a contract of sale between two countries that are party to the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The contract provides that any dispute that might arise is to be settled by arbitration in Danubia, a country that has enacted the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration and is a party to the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. The arbitral rules to be applied rotate yearly among the arbitration rules of co-sponsors of the Moot.
