Think of law as software. State agency budgets and staff are hardware. We have been stripping the copper for the past forty years, making software updates questionably useful, without durable fixes to the hardware. For constitutional environmental rights to make a difference, state natural resource departments need to be adequately funded and staffed.

– Sonya Ziaja, University of Baltimore School of Law, from an excellent new empirically grounded paper on the disconnect between environmental and natural resource laws as they are written and their real impacts on the ground.