Digital Commons Network^™

Same As It Ever Was : The Tijuana River Sewage Crisis, Non-State Actors, And The State, James M. Cooper

Faculty Scholarship

Sewage—a scary mixture of human waste and industrial toxins—flows into the Tijuana River Valley, an environmentally sensitive watershed that straddles the United Mexican States ("Mexico") and the United States of America. Treatment plants, a deteriorating one in Punta Bandera with limited capacity south of the border, and another in San Diego County completed in 1997, are inadequate to process the volume of sewage. So much sewage made its way into the Tijuana River that CBS 60 Minutes broadcast a special report on the binational environmental disaster in 2020.

Border factories and a population spike contribute to the sewage. Maquiladoras, …

Administrative Guidance And Genetically Modified Food, Edward L. Rubin, Joanna K. Sax

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most controversial issues in administrative law, the use of guidance, is exemplified by the regulation of one of the most controversial areas in modern society: genetically modified (GM) food. The appropriate use of guidance versus notice and comment rulemaking is a much-debated issue in administrative law. While agency officials generally assert that they are using guidance to express an agency’s thoughts about how to comply with a specific statutory provision or agency rule, the practical consequence is that the regulated party will hesitate to disobey, even if it believes that the guidance goes beyond the requirements of …

The Lender As Unconventional Fiduciary, Niels Schaumann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines one kind of fiduciary relationship—one that develops from an ordinary, arms-length commercial relationship between a lender and a borrower. Although this prototype relationship exists in the broader context of “lender liability,” to which academic commentators and the practicing bar have paid a good deal of attention in recent years, the suggested analysis has as much to do with fiduciary relationships generally as it does with issues of lender liability. The unconventional fiduciary relationship examined here differs in several respects from the conventional fiduciary relationship, for example that of trustee-beneficiary. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that the …