This chapter explores alternatives to international environmental liability of the contractor. First, it argues that, although the insurability of environmental liability in DSM is controversial at a theoretical level, it is less problematic at a practical level. Second, it argues that environmental compensation funds and liability regimes share the same purpose and they are functionally complementary. Yet, funds are based on the notion of solidarity, which is fundamentally distinct from liability regimes. Particularly, it analyses the possible contributing entity/entities to an environmental compensation fund to be established in the DSM context, thereby filling in the gap left by international environmental liabilities. Insurance and compensation fund both derive from the idea of ‘allocation of loss’ which includes players other than the one liable; the practicability of these alternatives depends on the willingness of others to join the compensation regimes. Third, it argues that the administrative approach places regulator at the centre of environmental liability regime, it has practical advantages in comparison with the court-centred civil liability approach. Two scenarios for the application of this approach are examined.

Using Brian Simpson’s Invitation to Law as an opening, Part I explores that basic idea that law is for lawyers. Law requires study, training, and reflection. Its development cannot rest on intuition alone. The paradigmatic double-sided question for professional growth is,“what is (the) law?” Taking this question as law’s leading query, this part explores the beginnings of Holmes’s jurisprudence and his early efforts to map the common law. It looks closely at Holmes’s understanding of a legal duty and a legal penalty and how he reshaped the Austinian heritage to develop his own notion of a jurisprudential boundary.

This chapter highlights how legislators, prosecutors, and judges sympathetic to a tough-on-crime or “using the stick” approach to pregnant women and their bodies miscalculate the human and financial costs of their decision-making. Their approaches do not improve health outcomes for women or their children. Rather, legislators, prosecutors, and judges are misguided to believe that harsh criminal punishments and invasive civil sanctions reduce the incidents of miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, genetic abnormalities, childhood asthma, obesity, diabetes, and more. Yet, these conditions are not improved, let alone cured, through criminal punishment or civil confinement of pregnant women.

It is often said, invoking the seventeenth-century Chancellor Lord Nottingham, that the Chancery – or modern courts of equitable jurisdiction – ‘mends no man’s bargain’. This chapter suggests that a legal system which holds that opinion is unwise to do so, that modern courts are not constrained to share that opinion, and that Lord Nottingham himself did not hold it. In various cases, Nottingham granted relief which modified a contractual bargain, or showed himself willing to do so. The power of courts to do so continued to be recognised into the nineteenth century, when it came under fire from the dogma that freedom of contract is sacrosanct. However, modern cases show that the legal system must also advance other values. The necessity to avoid unjust windfalls is an example. The courts can do so, and should be willing to modify contracts in limited situations, without necessarily relying on the language of equity.