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Full-Text Articles in Law
Flint's Fight For Environmental Rights, Noah D. Hall
Flint's Fight For Environmental Rights, Noah D. Hall
Northwestern University Law Review
This Essay reviews the recent development of environmental rights within U.S. constitutional law, advanced through a series of federal court decisions in the wake of the Flint water crisis. The residents of Flint were poisoned and lied to by their government for nearly two years. They experienced how American environmental governance has failed at the state and federal levels and how our environmental laws leave individuals and communities unprotected. And then Flint fought back, in the courts, for five years. Flint residents have been overwhelmingly successful, achieving some justice for themselves and advancing substantive rights and remedies within our constitutional …
Swamp Money: The Opportunity And Uncertainty Of Investing In Wetland Mitigation Banking, Elan L. Spanjer
Swamp Money: The Opportunity And Uncertainty Of Investing In Wetland Mitigation Banking, Elan L. Spanjer
Northwestern University Law Review
In recent years, the wetland mitigation banking program has emerged as a favored mechanism for protecting the nation’s aquatic resources while allowing for economically beneficial development projects to proceed. Mitigation banks generate wetland credits, which in turn can be sold at a profit to developers who need them to offset wetland impacts. The number of mitigation banks has grown significantly in recent years, and the market has seen an influx of institutional investment. However, investors face significant risks and uncertainty, and many prospective investors lack access to information about wetland credit prices—which are neither reported to the regulatory authorities nor …
Valuing Foreign Lives And Civilizations In Cost-Benefit Analysis: The Case Of The United States And Climate Change Policy, David A. Dana
Valuing Foreign Lives And Civilizations In Cost-Benefit Analysis: The Case Of The United States And Climate Change Policy, David A. Dana
Faculty Working Papers
This Article explores the case for including losses of foreign (non-U.S.) lives and settlements in the estimated cost to the United States of unmitigated climate change in the future. The inclusion of losses of such foreign lives and settlements in cost benefit analysis (CBA) could have large implications not only for U.S. climate change policy but also for policies adopted by other nations and the practice of CBA generally. One difficult problem is how to assess U.S. residents' willingness to pay to prevent the losses of foreign lives and settlements. This Article discusses internet-based surveys that are a first step …
The Contextual Rationality Of The Precautionary Principle, David A. Dana
The Contextual Rationality Of The Precautionary Principle, David A. Dana
Faculty Working Papers
This article defines the precautionary principle (PP) primarily based on what it is not: it is not quantitative cost-benefit analysis (CBA) or cost-cost analysis of the sort we associate with the Office of Management and Budget in the United States and U.S. policymaking and policy discourse generally. In this definition, the PP is a form of analysis in which the costs of a possible environmental or health risk are not quantified, or if they are, any quantification is likely to be inadequate to capture the full extent of the costs of not taking regulatory measures to mitigate or avoid the …
The Mismatch Between Public Nuisance Law And Global Warming, David A. Dana
The Mismatch Between Public Nuisance Law And Global Warming, David A. Dana
Faculty Working Papers
The federal courts using the common law method of case-by-case adjudication may have institutional advantages over the more political branches, such as perhaps more freedom from interest group capture and more flexibility to tailor decisions to local conditions. Any such advantages, however, are more than offset by the disadvantages of relying on the courts in common resource management in general and in the management of the global atmospheric commons in particular. The courts are best able to serve a useful function resolving climate-related disputes once the political branches have acted by establishing a policy framework and working through the daunting …