In theoretical accounts of environmental law, traditional environmental-law education, and much of the discourse of environmental-law implementation, negotiation is absent, except in a few celebrated and seemingly exceptional settings. When scholars and policy advocates do address the roles of negotiation, they tend to default to two competing conceptions. In one—the “command-and-control” view—environmental law is problematically centralized and rigid, and negotiation exists only in exceptional circumstances.

Choice architecture as defined by Professor Mormann in Climate Choice Architecture is helpful and important, but it is also easy to overestimate its impact. It is not everything. This Comment argues that choice architecture is framing a decision at the point of decisionmaking, presenting a list in a specific way, like the decoy effect, setting defaults. Sometimes, social norms and feedback is choice architecture if presented at the time of making a decision or if presented at the optimal choice opportunity.

Prof. Felix Mormann’s Climate Choice Architecture provides a comprehensive framework and a masterful summary of the state of knowledge on behavioral nudges as they are applied to environmental outcomes. It does a great job of summarizing the literature and also crosses over from energy into water as well. This Comment supports Professor Mormann's conclusion that nudges can be very powerful instruments for achieving climate goals.

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. This Comment highlights the results of the ELPAR article selection process and reports on the environmental legal scholarship for the 2022-2023 academic year, including the number of environmental law articles published in general-interest law reviews versus environment-focused law journals, and the topics covered in the articles.