Green Building Legal Research Guide   Tags: energy, energy_law, environmental_law, green_building, land use, local_laws, municipal_laws, ordinances, sustainable_development  

This guide is written for use by Pace Law School students, faculty and staff, and contains links to green building law resources, with a focus on finding local land use laws.   

• Many treatises and some books are made available on Westlaw and WestlawNext, or Lexis.com.  Where secondary sources are available on WestlawNext or Lexis.com, links have been provided along with call numbers for secondary sources that we hold in print. 
• Some of the links included in in this guide require passwords which are available to Pace Law School students, faculty and staff via TWEN.  

Researchers from other institutions should ask their librarians for assistance if they do not have access to the materials noted in this guide.  

This research guide is an ongoing project. I would like to thank the staff at Pace's Land Use Law Center for their many helpful suggestions regarding websites and topics to include in the guide, and I welcome additional comments/suggestions from anyone who is using this guide.

The EPA defines green building as:

[C]reating structures and using processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building's life-cycle from siting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation and deconstruction. This practice expands and complements the classical building design concerns of economy, utility, durability, and comfort. Green building is also known as a sustainable or high performance building. [1]

Researchers looking at land use law issues will need to consider federal and state statutes, federal and state cases, and federal and state administrative regulations and decisions. These resources can easily be searched by researchers with access to Westlaw and/or Lexis.

More difficult to locate are the local laws which put into effect the land use plans of local governments, and the planning documents, both local and regional, which inform land use planning. 

[1] U.S. Envtl. Prot. Agency, Green Building, http://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/pubs/about.htm (last visited July 4, 2012).

These research guides on related topics are written and maintained by reference librarians at the Pace Law School Library. 

Research guides are often written with a specific audience in mind and may contain call numbers or specific to that library or may list databases specific to that library. When using a research guide published by another library, you can always check the Pace Library Catalog to see if we own a particular book and check Pace Law Library's list of databases to see if we have a subscription for a particular database.