Hundreds of Harvard Law School (HLS) students have signed a petition urging the school to hire professors who specialize in environmental law, an area that many say is ignored at Harvard.

HLS second-year Christopher T. Giovinazzo, who organized the petition, presented copies to University President Lawrence H. Summers and the entire Law School faculty yesterday.

He also presented the document, which has 350 student signatures, to incoming Dean of the Law School Elena Kagan.

Kagan told a meeting of law school student leaders yesterday that hiring faculty who specialize in environmental law is a priority, according to Giovinazzo.

Kagan could not be reached for comment.

The petition claims that “opportunities in environmental law at Harvard remain clearly sub-standard,” and that HLS has “fewer environmental classes than law schools half our size.”

There are no professors at HLS whose primary focus is environmental law, and the school offered only five classes in the field this year.

Stanford Law School, on the contrary, offered nine environmental law courses this year, and Yale Law School offered eight. Both of those schools are less than half the size of HLS.

The last Harvard faculty member with a primary focus on environmental law was Richard Stewart, who left for New York University (NYU) Law School in the late 1980s.

But professors said that since then, Harvard has made an effort to hire more environmental law faculty.

The school made an offer to environmental law expert Richard L. Revesz a few years ago, though Revesz declined and went on to become the dean of NYU Law School.

A crop of visiting professors with expertise in environmental law is slated to arrive at the Law School next year, and many are hoping this group will help to at least partially meet student demand for more opportunities in the field.

“Our program [is] weaker than we’d like it to be, but we have a very good set of visitors next year who will offer a considerable set of environmental law courses,” said Todd D. Rakoff, dean of the J.D. program and Byrne professor of administrative law.

And professors are hoping that a handful of these visiting faculty will plant roots in Cambridge.

“Inviting someone to be a visiting professor is a prelude to making someone an offer [for a permanent position],” said Caspersen Professor of Law Howell E. Jackson, who is also helping to organize a conference on environmental law next fall.