Law Commons^™

A Regulatory Wake-Up Call: Lessons From Bp’S Deepwater Horizon Disaster, Rebecca M. Bratspies

Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal

In learning from the BP disaster, there are two levels at which to understand what happened, and two kinds of lessons to draw: straightforward and complex. The straightforward lesson focuses on BP as a distinct entity, emphasizing the company’s culpability for its poor decisions. The complex lesson does not deny BP’s culpability but seeks to situate BP’s private actions within a broader regulatory context in order to identify systemic failures that contributed to the disaster.

This Article delves into both sets of lessons, concentrating more on the “complex” explanation, which involves recognizing gaps in the statutory scheme and conflicts in …

The Ninth Circuit's "Clarifications" In Lands Council V. Mcnair: Much Ado About Nothing?, Keith G. Bauerle

Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal

In this Article, I will first provide some background for the issues treated in the decision, beginning with the NFMA’s and NEPA’s statutory and regulatory requirements and how they were interpreted in the two Ninth Circuit cases that lead to the McNair decision, Lands Council v. Powell and Ecology Center v. Austin. I will then outline the history of the Lands Council v. McNair litigation, and from there discuss the Ninth Circuit’s en banc decision. Placing the decision in the context of the circuit’s NFMA and NEPA jurisprudence, I argue that the decision’s holdings, on their own, do not constitute …

Warren County's Legacy For Federal And State Environmental Impact Assessment Laws, Anhthu Hoang

Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal

The first part of this article discusses the modern environmental-quality review process at the federal and state levels, starting with a summary of the National Environmental Policy Act and then California’s and New York’s approaches. This is followed by a brief discussion of how each entity addresses environmental justice. The second part describes one community’s difficulties in meeting the required evidentiary showing to demonstrate environmental injustice.