Faculty Scholarship

Faculty Scholarship Smith returns to scholarly roots with environmental crimes book

Professor Susan Smith’s latest research has her returning to topics she first explored years ago.

Smith is senior editor of the “Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Environmental Crimes and Criminal Enforcement,” which will be published in 2024. In it, scholars from around the globe discuss environmental crimes and criminal enforcement. Smith will also contribute an introduction and a chapter on “Defining and Sentencing Environmental Crimes: Environmental Regulatory Systems and Social Norms.”

“This project returns me to my earliest scholarship — a comprehensive treatise on Crimes Against the Environment and several articles on the role of criminal enforcement in environmental regulatory systems,” Smith says.

Another project, her article, “Taming the Deranged Beasts: Harnessing the Global Power of Transnational Corporations to Create a Just and Sustainable Future,” will be submitted for law review publication in Spring 2024. The article expands and revises an idea she published nearly a decade ago. In the piece, she seeks to establish an effective means to control the impacts of large, transnational corporations on people and the planet. They would be required to have an international charter obligating them to comply with human rights and environmental laws.

“These projects fit directly into the core of environmental and natural resources law,” Smith says. “My research is a direct benefit to my students — it keeps me involved in the cutting-edge of scholarly discussion in my field, deepening my understanding of current issues in the topics I teach.”

Maril fights for democracy

Over the past year, Professor Robin Maril has frequently written or contributed to op-eds and news articles, in addition to working on law review articles. Most of her work is related, she says, and focuses on nondiscrimination protections and religious freedom.

“What I’m really interested in at the moment is the status of our democracy,” she says.

One article Maril completed last fall, “When It Happens Here: Reproductive Autonomy, Fascism, and Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” is forthcoming in Pace Law Review. The article dives into fascist regimes from history and how their past relates to Dobbs (the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right of abortion). Maril says fascist regimes in the past, for example, disseminated a harmful rhetoric that certain minorities were harmful to the health of the state — therefore, the state had to constrain them.

“Nothing about America necessarily protects us from going this way,” Maril explains. “It’s important to talk about it. It’s a big thing to not take our democracy for granted.”

Maril has no plans to slow down with her research. She recently completed another piece that looks at trans rights and abortion rights post-Dobbs, publishing in SMU Law Review this fall. Her newest article will examine the impact of the Dobbs case on the future viability of autonomy claims under the Due Process Clause of the 14th amendment. She’s also working on a book proposal.

“I’m a queer person raised in northern Oklahoma and really understand the impact of polarization,” Maril says. “You can’t take things for granted and have to be really present and ready to have conversations with people if you want democratically recognized change.”