Law Commons^™

Nepa In The Hot Seat: A Proposal For An Office Of Environmental Analysis, Aliza M. Cohen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Judicial deference under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) can be problematic. It is a well-established rule of administrative law that courts will grant a high degree of deference to agency decisions. They do this out of respect for agency expertise and policy judgment. This deference is applied to NEPA lawsuits without acknowledging the special pressures that agencies face while assessing the environmental impacts of their own projects. Though there is a strong argument that these pressures undermine the reasons for deferential review, neither the statute nor the courts have provided plaintiffs with adequate means to remedy this problem. Agency …

From Chevron To Massachusetts: Justice Stevens's Approach To Securing The Public Interest, Kathryn A. Watts

Articles

During the past three decades, one Supreme Court justice— John Paul Stevens—has authored two of the most significant administrative law decisions that speak to the judiciary’s role in checking agency interpretations of the statutes that they administer. In Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., Justice Stevens’s landmark 1984 decision unanimously upheld the EPA’s construction of a term found in the Clean Air Act. Subsequently, in Massachusetts v. EPA, Justice Stevens’s 2007 opinion for a five-justice majority handed a major win to global environmental security by ordering the EPA to reconsider its refusal to regulate greenhouse …

Chevron's Sliding Scale In Wyeth V. Levine, 129 S. Ct. 1187 (2009), Gregory M. Dickinson

Gregory M Dickinson

In Wyeth v. Levine the Supreme Court once again failed to reconcile the interpretive presumption against preemption with the sometimes competing Chevron doctrine of deference to agencies' reasonable statutory interpretations. Rather than resolve the issue of which principle should govern where the two principles point toward opposite results, the Court continued its recent practice of applying both principles halfheartedly, carving exceptions, and giving neither its proper weight.

This analysis situates Wyeth within the larger framework of the Court's recent preemption decisions in an effort to explain the Court's hesitancy to resolve the conflict. The analysis concludes that the Court, motivated …