Study

Everything we eat arrives at the table through a vast national (and increasingly global) food and agriculture system. That system produces abundant, affordable food, but at real and growing cost. It generates serious environmental harms: water and air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, soil depletion, wetlands loss, and collapsing fisheries, among others. Yet a tradition of "agricultural exceptionalism" exempts farming from much of our environmental and labor law. And increasingly, the system's costs show up in our own health: diet-related diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease have reached epidemic levels, driven in part by a food environment that law and policy helped build.

This course surveys the law and policy that created the modern American food system and that will shape its future. Topics include the farm bill and federal commodity supports; environmental regulation and its agricultural exemptions; nutrition policy and emerging litigation over diet-related harm; farm labor; animal welfare; climate change; and food and agricultural technology. We give particular attention to local and regenerative agriculture for their ideas about soil, livestock, land, and community stewardship, and as a movement of growing influence in federal agricultural policy, from conservation programs to climate-smart farming initiatives.

Students will weigh competing visions for reform and develop their own. Each student writes a law or policy paper proposing a concrete improvement to the laws governing food and agriculture. For LLM SRP, the final paper must be on a topic that is legal, rather than policy based.

Fall 2026

Course Number	Course Credits	Evaluation Method	Instructor
636.01	2	Reflective Writing Research and/or analytical paper(s), 10-15 pages Oral presentation Class participation	Lee Miller
Canvas site: https://canvas.duke.edu/courses/86494