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Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Law

Institutional Framework For Open Space Conservation, Janice Griffith Aug 2020

Institutional Framework For Open Space Conservation, Janice Griffith

Journal of Comparative Urban Law and Policy

Finding an effective approach to conserve large-scale, multipurpose open spaces through a coordinated network across jurisdictional boundary lines has proved elusive. Because open space infrastructure serves so many functions ranging from recreational trails to ecological systems protection, decision makers have often treated open space as a subpart of another activity and overlooked its importance. After discussing the benefits of open space conservation, this article analyzes the impediments to its realization. Noting the institutional fragmentation that surrounds open space conservation, the article discusses the governmental and private sector bodies that implement actions designed to achieve it. The article argues that open …


Climate Policy & Environmental Justice Recommendations For Colorado: Environmental Justice And The Climate Action Plan To Reduce Pollution, Kevin J. Lynch, Edwin Lamair, Evan Healey Aug 2020

Climate Policy & Environmental Justice Recommendations For Colorado: Environmental Justice And The Climate Action Plan To Reduce Pollution, Kevin J. Lynch, Edwin Lamair, Evan Healey

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This report was primarily drafted in the Spring of 2019, as the Colorado Legislature considered, and ultimately enacted, HB 19-1261. Since that time, developments have only highlighted the critical importance of considering the justice impacts of any public health and environmental responses to the threat of climate change. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the stark racial and class disparities that environmental conditions have on the health of a community. The same facilities and mobile sources that emit climate pollution also typically emit particulate matter and smogforming pollution that cause respiratory illness in many communities. These underlying conditions are …


Disclosing The Danger: State Attorney Ethics Rules Meet Climate Change, Victor B. Flatt Jul 2020

Disclosing The Danger: State Attorney Ethics Rules Meet Climate Change, Victor B. Flatt

Utah Law Review

This Article suggests a novel concept in climate change law and attorney ethics law by proposing that many states’ attorney ethics laws could be interpreted to require, or at least permit, attorneys to disclose client activity relating to greenhouse gas emissions. Every state has some form of ABA Model Rule 1.6(b), either requiring or allowing attorneys to disclose client activities that result in death or substantial bodily harm. This Article asserts that precedent surrounding this disclosure rule indicates that the rule could be applicable to harms caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Attorney disclosures, in turn, could impact a wide swath …


Disunity Among The United States: Navigating Net-Metering Without Getting Electrocuted, Aundene Szmolyan Jan 2020

Disunity Among The United States: Navigating Net-Metering Without Getting Electrocuted, Aundene Szmolyan

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

As it stands, the progress towards fighting climate change at the national level is in disarray, and there is a complete disunity of direction and goals at the state level. This paper highlights the disunity by providing a case study of the different regulations, which affect the solar power industry across all fifty states, with a particular focus paid to net metering regulations. Through an examination of this industry, three startling conclusions will emerge. First, investor-owned utilities apply intense political pressure through lobbying efforts to maintain the current status quo of the utility industry’s economic model, which results in the …


The Rise And Fall Of Clean Air Act Climate Policy, Nathan Richardson Jan 2020

The Rise And Fall Of Clean Air Act Climate Policy, Nathan Richardson

Faculty Publications

The Clean Air Act has proven to be one of the most successful and durable statutes in American law. After the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, there was great hope that the Act could be brought to bear on climate change, the most pressing current environmental challenge of our time. Massachusetts was fêted as the most important environmental case ever decided, and, upon it, the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama built a sweeping program of greenhouse gas regulations, aimed first at emissions from road vehicles, and later at fossil fuel power plants. It was the most …


Trauma-Centered Social Justice, Noa Ben-Asher Jan 2020

Trauma-Centered Social Justice, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

This Article identifies a new and growing phenomenon in the American legal system. Many leading agendas for gender, racial, and climate justice are centered on emotional trauma as the primary injury of contemporary social injustices. By focusing on three social justice movements–#BlackLivesMatter; #MeToo, and Climate Justice–the Article offers the first comprehensive diagnosis and assessment of how emotional trauma has become an engine for legal and policy social justice reforms. From a nineteenth century psychoanalytic theory about repressed childhood sexual memories that manifest in female hysteria, through extensive medicalization and classification in the twentieth century, emotional trauma has evolved and expanded …