Law Commons^™

Golden Rules For Transboundary Pollution, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental law is becoming ever more centralized. In the United States, state and local pollution laws have been eclipsed by federal regulation. In the European Community, and to a lesser degree under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), national controls have been supplemented by regional regulation. And the growing importance of treaties regulating particular aspects of the global environment has reinforced calls for more general regimes of international environmental regulation.

One inevitably given justification for this centralizing trend is that pollution is a transboundary phenomenon. Air and water pollution, and to a lesser extent groundwater contamination, can cross political …

Comparative Risk Assessment In New York, Michael B. Gerrard, Deborah Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative risk assessment (CRA) is the examination of the relative risks posed by different dangers, with a view to deciding which dangers deserve the most governmental attention. CRA frequently tries to reduce different problems to a common metric, usually the statistical lives saved by a program, so that apples can be weighed against oranges. This article will discuss and assess the growing use of CRA in New York State.

There are two principal arguments for the use of CRA in the environmental context. The first is that we do not have unlimited resources; we cannot move against all problems simultaneously. …

The Victims Of Nimby, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

It is a syndrome, a pejorative, and an acronym of our times: NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard. It has a political arm, NIMTOO (Not In My Term Of Office), an object of attack, LULUs (Locally Undesired Land Uses), and an extreme form, BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone). Acronyms aside, however, the question remains as to whether or not NIMBY has victims. Is anyone hurt by NIMBY?

Many leading voices in the environmental justice movement believe that minority communities are victims of NIMBY. For example, Professor Robert D. Bullard has written that "[t]he cumulative effect of not-in-my-backyard …

The Role Of Existing Environmental Laws In The Environmental Justice Movement, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

I will focus on what can and cannot be done under the existing statutory and regulatory structures and the common law to protect minority communities from environmental hazards. I will highlight some of the current holes in the legal system to suggest areas where statutory reform might be useful. Fights against these facilities break down between future unbuilt facilities, on the one hand, and existing facilities on the other hand.

A broad array of statutes regulates future facilities, such as landfills, incinerators, interstate highways, and polluting factories. Some of these laws are aimed at providing information and requiring the decision …

Fear And Loathing In The Siting Of Hazardous And Radioactive Waste Facilities: A Comprehensive Approach To A Misperceived Crisis, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Few laws have failed so completely as the federal and state statutes designed to create new facilities for the disposal of hazardous and radioactive waste. Despite scores of siting attempts and the expenditure of several billion dollars since the mid-1970s, only one radioactive waste disposal facility, only one hazardous waste landfill (in the aptly named Last Chance, Colorado), and merely a handful of hazardous waste treatment and incineration units are operating on new sites in the United States today.

In 1981, a leading member of Congress, relying on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), predicted that by 1985 …

Environmental Commercial Law – Update On Seqra Lawsuits For 1994, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The Courts decided 57 cases1 in 1994 under the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA).2 As in prior years,3 this column presents a statistical summary of these cases and analyzes emerging trends. The 57 cases last year are about the same number as in 1993, but are down from the 70-75 seen annually in the early 1990s.

Recovery For Economic Loss Following The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

The physical cleanup following one of the worst oil spills in history, that of the Exxon Valdez, is done. The legal cleanup, however, has barely begun. Over 100 law firms participating in over 200 suits in federal and state courts involving more than 30,000 claims are presently engaged in litigation. Fishermen, cannery workers, fishing lodges, tour boat operators, oil companies whose shipments were delayed, and even California motorists facing higher gasoline prices have filed claims against Exxon and its fellow defendants.

Most claimants face a formidable roadblock, the so-called Robins doctrine. Under Robins Dry Dock & Repair Co. v. Flint …

Two Social Movements, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Two social movements in the last fifty years have had a profound impact on our understanding of law and the role of the courts in our system of government. One is the civil rights movement. The demand for greater racial and gender equality and other civil rights has changed the face of the law in countless ways. For example, it has called into question – or at least required a fundamental revision in – the traditional understanding that the courts should interpret the Constitution and laws in accordance with their original meaning. Decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education …

Panel Iii: International Law, Global Environmentalism, And The Future Of American Environmental Policy, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

From an American perspective, environmental law has undergone two bouts of centralization in the past three decades. Round one occurred in the 1970's, as Congress federalized vast areas of environmental law that had previously been the province of state and local governments. Round two, which is still in an incipient phase, represents the effort to internationalize environmental law.

The question I would like to address is what can we learn from round one about what is likely to happen in round two. My answer, in a nutshell, is that the primary driving force behind the federalization of environmental law in …

The Dynamics Of Secrecy In The Environmental Impact Statement Process, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The environmental impact review laws – the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and its state counterparts – are premised on the idea of full and open disclosure. The notion underlying these laws is that if the government and the public are fully informed of the impacts of and alternatives to proposed actions, they will make wise decisions about whether and how to proceed. The Freedom of Information Act and its state counterparts even more explicitly seek to open up governmental deliberations to the public. Considered together, these two types of laws would lead one to believe that secrecy has little …

Finessing The Siting Conundrum, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

There is a place that today's industrial society desperately wishes to find. In prior eras, people sought Nirvana or the Fountain of Youth or Shangri-La – states of mind (or nothingness) as much as places, really. The object of today's quest has no neighbors, no endangered or threatened species, no hydraulic link to precious groundwater; ideally, it has no connection to the biosphere at all.

That place is called "away," as in, "Let's dig up this contamination and haul it away," or, "We need to take this waste away." The public and private sectors in the United States have spent …

Judicial Deference To Executive Precedent, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

In 1984, the Supreme Court adopted a new framework for determining when courts should defer to interpretations of statutes by administrative agencies. Previous decisions had looked to multiple contextual factors in answering this question. Chevron U.S., Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, Inc. appeared to reject this approach and require that federal courts defer to any reasonable interpretation by an agency charged with administration of a statute, provided Congress has not clearly specified a contrary answer. The Court justified this new general rule of deference by positing that Congress has implicitly delegated interpretative authority to all agencies charged with enforcing …

Cleaning House: Environmental Hazards Can Undermine A Property's Use And Value, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Numerous horror movies and books depict the woes that befall fictional homeowners who don't know or care that they are living too close to cemeteries or brooding woods or scenes of hauntings.

However, even the vivid imaginations of filmmakers and novelists can't conjure up some of the real-life horrors that environmental hazards can create for property owners. These hazards can destroy the value and salability of property, render it unusable for its intended purpose, and burden owners with clean-up costs, fines and lawsuits.

Fortunately, an alert eye and inexpensive tests can identify most common environmental dangers.

Independent Agencies - Independent From Whom?, Sally Katzen, Edward Markey, James Miller, Joseph Grundfest, R. Gaull Silberman, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Chernobyl Fallout: Recent Iaea Conventions Expand Transboundary Nuclear Pollution Law, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

After releasing a radioactive cloud over Europe, the April 1986 nuclear power plant accident at Chernobyl in the USSR sparked a chain-reaction of diplomatic negotiation that culminated in two recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conventions on nuclear accidents. The Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident (Convention on Early Notification) and the Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency (Convention on Assistance) were both opened for signature on September 26, 1986 at the end of a three-day IAEA special session on the lessons of the Soviet nuclear plant disaster. In the months …

Understanding The Plaintiff's Attorney: The Implications Of Economic Theory For Private Enforcement Of Law Through Class And Derivative Actions, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Probably to a unique degree, American law relies upon private litigants to enforce substantive provisions of law that in other legal systems are left largely to the discretion of public enforcement agencies. This system of enforcement through "private attorneys general" is most closely associated with the federal antitrust and securities laws and the common law's derivative action, but similar institutional arrangements have developed recently in the environmental, "mass tort," and employment discrimination fields. The key legal rules that make the private attorney general a reality in American law today, however, are not substantive but procedural – namely, those rules that …

The Limits Of Rationality And The Place Of Religious Conviction: Protecting Animals And The Environment, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

When people hold religious views that have implications for moral choices and for the desirable uses of law, may they properly rely on those religious views in our liberal democracy? The commonly expressed ideas that church and state are separate and that no group should impose its religious views on others may seem to suggest that political dialogue and bases for political decisions should be wholly nonreligious. This position, which is the main target of this Article, receives articulate defense among prominent social philosophers. This Article urges a different position: that no commonly shared ground of decision is available for …

Disclosure Of Hidden Energy Demands: A New Challenge For Nepa, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The specialization of the American economy obscures the identity of the ultimate users of energy, even from themselves. As a result consumers remain ignorant of the amount of energy which they use, and of the efficiency of that usage. Direct personal use of energy in the United States, such as electricity and natural gas for home heating, cooking and lighting, and gasoline for private automobiles, accounts for only about one-third of national energy use. Usage by industry and government to provide for the intermediate and final goods and services, for which we as individuals ultimately pay through our purchases and …