About This Journal
The Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental & Law (SJTEIL) is a co-curricular journal at the Seattle University School of Law, and is the current evolution of Seattle Journal of Environmental Law (SJEL) (the first environmental law journal in Washington State).
The current iteration of the Journal is a built upon a foundation that was formed over seven years ago, when the Seattle University School of Law Environmental Law Society (ELS) began publishing Environmental Perspectives, a legal magazine that included articles submitted by academics, practitioners, and students. In June 2008, the ELS Executive Board began a grassroots campaign to transform Perspectives into a school-supported, co-curricular journal. The Board created a management structure, invited students to apply, solicited article submissions, and garnered faculty support.
In April 2009, the first ever Bellwether: The Seattle Journal for Environmental Law and Policy was published. Although not an official co-curricular journal, the goal of the April 2009 edition was to resemble a school-supported journal as much as possible. Bellwether’s April 2009 Edition was a symposium issue focused upon the intersection of Environmental Law and Indian Law. Journal staff accepted six submissions from practitioners, students, and tribal government leaders. Scholarly works included in this issue ranged from articles on the effect of environmental regulation on the Columbia Basin to using Tribal Treaty Rights to protect the environment. The issue also included a practice guide on how tribes can approach air programs and a short note from a leading tribal activist about the role of tribes in protecting the environment.
The next iteration of the journal was published in June 2010 as the Seattle Environmental Law Journal (SELJ). Following in the footsteps of Bellwether, SELJ continued to grow, but still lacked faculty and administrative sanctioning. As a result, in the spring of 2010, the incoming Editorial Board began creating a blueprint for a new journal. Drawing from suggestions made by SU faculty, local practitioners, students, and academics from around the country, the Board embarked on the design of an online journal, featuring shorter, timelier pieces, along with more traditional law journal articles. In July 2010, the SU faculty approved SJEL as the third co-curricular publication at the school.
After garnering faculty and administrative sanctioning, the co-curricular form of the journal took shape. Volume 1 of SJEL was published on the online platform throughout the 2010-2011 academic year and following summer. It totaled 170 pages and included nine articles: five from professors, three from practitioners, and one from a non-SU student.
Independently of the SJEL, in 2016 a group of SU students and faculty members began work on creating a new SU-support journal that would explore the legal issues pertinent to technology, innovation and intellectual property businesses and studies that are increasingly dominating commerce worldwide. As this effort to create a technology-focused journal continued and became close to having all the necessary work done to actually launch, the SJEL leadership came to realize that incorporating the work and goals of the technology-focused journal into SJEL would make a journal positioned for continued relevance. Consequently, in the Spring of 2019, the two efforts were merged and approved by the SU faculty as the SJTEIL.
SJTEIL has since become a part of Seattle University School of Law's Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics Program (TILE), debuted in 2023. This program focuses on providing students with opportunities to delve into technology and innovation law in Seatle, Washington, one of the tech hubs of the world. TILE also provides their students with experience in, and professionals with help on, various related legal issues, enriching student's learning experience and providing low-cost legal help for innovators. SJTEIL has and will continue to publish issues each year and include articles written by students, practitioners, and professors on a wide variety of topics to spread awareness of important legal issues in the technology, environmental, and innovation spaces and amplify the voices of the practitioners doing this important work and students motivated to a make a difference in this field. Every issue is available here on the on-line platform as well as on Westlaw, and many are also available in print upon request.