The title of this book is a little misleading, although no more than that of many other law books, because ‘Wildlife Law’ implies a general coverage of the discipline. In fact the coverage is entirely related to the law of the USA.
The authors are both law professors at American universities (Illinois and Idaho) and their objective has been to provide an overview of wildlife law in the USA for a wide audience, from lawyers and law students to professionals working in natural resource management and ordinary citizens. The text is well written and, although it inevitably contains a certain amount of legal jargon, should nevertheless be accessible to the intelligent lay person.
The book consists of 13 chapters, beginning with ‘The basics,’ and subsequently covering areas such as state ownership, capturing and owning wildlife, private lands, inland fisheries, state game laws, federal statutes, Indian tribal rights and two chapters on the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In addition, there is a short, but very useful section, on the USA's court system, statutes and legal citations. The book is well produced with a logical layout, printed in a clear and readable typeface.
In a book of this size, the authors have been forced to be selective; they have previously published a more comprehensive textbook entitled Wildlife Law: Cases and Materials (Goble & Freyfogle Reference Goble and Freyfogle2001). However, I was surprised to find little or no mention of high profile legal cases concerning endangered species. Anyone hoping to read about the controversies surrounding the designation of critical habitat for the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), the reintroduction of grey wolves (Canis lupus) into Yellowstone National Park or the legal status of red wolves (Canis rufus) will be disappointed. The authors make vague references to the ‘ongoing controversy over wolves in the northern Rockies,’ but do not discuss these in detail or refer to the relevant case law. This leaves the reader feeling as though they should already know about this; this is not a good thing for a book intended as ‘a primer’.
Unfortunately, the work does not contain a table of laws. Such a table is common in many law books and allows the reader to locate references to particular laws (by title, section or paragraph) and court decisions (case law). Instead, some of this information is integrated into the index. As is common in legal texts, many of the references to legislation and case law are contained in notes rather than the main body of the text. However, these notes are arranged by chapter at the end of the book, an arrangement which I find irritating, as it requires the reader to switch between the text and the notes rather than simply glance at footnotes on the same page. Rather more important, however, is the fact that many of the legal sources quoted in the notes do not appear in the index. This makes it almost impossible to locate references to a particular law or case. For example, on p. 232, the text refers to a case concerned with the Bureau of Land Management's power to halt wolf hunts in Alaska. Note 75 tells me that the relevant case is Alaska v. Andrus, 429 F. Supp. 958. So far so good. But if I already knew the name of the case and was looking for references to it in this book, I would struggle to find any because the case does not appear in the index and there is no table of laws containing an alphabetical list of cases. A similar problem exists in relation to legislation. If the reader needs to locate all references to, for example, a particular section of the ESA, this is not possible. Page 254 refers to section 4(b)(3)(D) of the ESA, but there is no way of locating this reference or discovering if there are any further references to this section elsewhere in the book. These are important deficiencies in a law textbook.
In spite of my criticisms regarding the accessibility of the legal materials referred to in the text, this is a useful and authoritative book written by acknowledged experts, which successfully condenses a very large quantity of law into a relatively short text. It has fulfilled its objective of providing an overview of wildlife law which is accessible to a wide audience.
