Law Commons^™

Regulating For Energy Justice, Alexandra B. Klass, Gabriel Chan

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In this Article, we explore and critique the foundational norms that shape federal and state energy regulation and suggest pathways for reform that can incorporate principles of “energy justice.” These energy justice principles—developed in academic scholarship and social movements—include the equitable distribution of costs and benefits of the energy system, equitable participation and representation in energy decision making, and restorative justice for structurally marginalized groups.

While new legislation, particularly at the state level, is critical to the effort to advance energy justice, our focus here is on regulators’ ability to implement reforms now using their existing authority to advance the …

Funding Global Governance, Kristina B. Daugirdas

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Funding is an oft-overlooked but critically important determinant of what public institutions are able to accomplish. This article focuses on the growing role of earmarked voluntary contributions from member states in funding formal international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization. Heavy reliance on such funds can erode the multilateral governance of international organizations and poses particular risks for two kinds of undertakings: normative work, such as setting standards and identifying best practices; and evaluating the conduct of member states and holding those states accountable, including through public criticism, when they fall short. International organizations have …

Back To The Future: Creating A Bipartisan Environmental Movement For The 21st Century, David M. Uhlmann

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With a contentious presidential election looming amidst a pandemic, economic worries, and historic protests against systemic racism, climate action may seem less pressing than other challenges. Nothing could be further from the truth. To prevent greater public health threats and economic dislocation from climate disruption, which will disproportionately harm Black Americans, people of color, and indigenous people, this Comment argues that we need to restore the bipartisanship that fueled the environmental movement and that the fate of the planet—and our children and grandchildren—depends upon our collective action.

Tribes, Cities, And Children: Emerging Voices In Environmental Litigation, Nina A. Mendelson

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an environmental nongovernmental organization ("NGO") on behalf of a neighbor or hiker.1 The NGO would allege that the individual faced health risks, that her property was contaminated, or that she could no longer hike, fish, swim, or view wildlife such as the endangered Nile crocodile, as in the well-known case of Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife.

Wrongful Benefit & Arctic Drilling, Nicolas Cornell, Sarah E. Light

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The law contains a diverse range of doctrines — “slayer rules” that prevent murderers from inheriting, restrictions on trade in “conflict diamonds,” the Fourth Amendment’s exclusion of evidence obtained through unconstitutional search, and many more — that seem to instantiate a general principle that it can be wrong to profit from past harms or misconduct. This Article explores the contours of this general normative principle, which we call the wrongful benefit principle. As we illustrate, the wrongful benefit principle places constraints both on whether anyone should be permitted to exploit ethically tainted goods, and who may be permitted to profit …

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

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In this section: • United States Achieves Progress in Iran Relations with Nuclear Agreement Implementation, Prisoner Swap, and Hague Claims Tribunal Resolutions • European Union and United States Conclude Agreement to Regulate Transatlantic Personal Data Transfers • After Lengthy Delay, Congress Approves IMF Governance Reforms that Empower Emerging Market and Developing Countries • United States Joins Consensus on Paris Climate Agreement • United States and Eleven Other Nations Conclude Trans-Pacific Partnership

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

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In this section: • United States and France Sign Agreement to Compensate Holocaust Victims • United States Conducts Naval Operation Within Twelve Nautical Miles of Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, Prompting Protests from China • United States Pursues Bilateral and Multilateral Initiatives in and Around the Arctic

Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime, David M. Uhlmann

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In January 1991, just four weeks after joining the Justice Department’sEnvironmental Crimes Section as an entry-level attorney, I traveled to NewOrleans to attend an environmental enforcement conference. The conferencewas attended by hundreds of criminal prosecutors and civil attorneys from theJustice Department, as well as enforcement officials from the EnvironmentalProtection Agency (“EPA”). It was a propitious time for environmental protec-tion efforts in the United States. Less than two months earlier, President GeorgeH. W. Bush had signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, culminating aremarkable twenty-year period that created the modern environmental law sys-tem in the United States. My new office, …

Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime, David M. Uhlmann

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Prosecutorial discretion exists throughout the criminal justice system but plays a particularly significant role for environmental crime. Congress made few distinctions under the environmental laws between acts that could result in criminal, civil, or administrative enforcement. As a result, there has been uncertainty about which environmental violations will result in criminal enforcement and persistent claims about the overcriminalization of environmental violations. To address these concerns — and to delineate an appropriate role for criminal enforcement in the environmental regulatory scheme — I have proposed that prosecutors should reserve criminal enforcement for violations that involve one or more of the following …

Hydraulic Fracturing: Sources Of Law And Information, Barbara H. Garavaglia

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Hydraulic fracturing—also known as fracking—has become increasingly controversial in the United States over the past several years, especially in states such as Michigan with large shale gas deposits that were previously unextractable. In 2012, a Michigan fracking ban initiative failed to make it onto the November statewide ballot, but citizens groups are presently collecting signatures in an attempt to get the initiative onto the November 2014 ballot as an “initiated state statute.” And, more recently, state auctions of drilling permits have been the scenes of citizen protests driven by concerns about the potential environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing.

The Quest For A Sustainable Future And The Dawn Of A New Journal At Michigan Law, David M. Uhlmann

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When I joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 2007, the first assignment I gave students in my Environmental Law and Policy class was John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. It must have seemed like a curious choice to them, particularly coming from a professor who just three months earlier had been the Chief of the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. The book was not a dramatic tale of courtroom battles. In fact, the book was not even about the law, and the clash of environmental values it depicted pre-dated the environmental …

After The Spill Is Gone: The Gulf Of Mexico, Environmental Crime, And Criminal Law, David M. Uhlmann

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The Gulf oil spill was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, and will be the most significant criminal case ever prosecuted under U.S. environmental laws. The Justice Department is likely to prosecute BP, Transocean, and Halliburton for criminal violations of the Clean Water Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which will result in the largest fines ever imposed in the United States for any form of corporate crime. The Justice Department also may decide to pursue charges for manslaughter, false statements, and obstruction of justice. The prosecution will shape public perceptions about environmental crime, for reasons that are …

Sequential Climate Change Policy, Edward A. Parson, Darshan Karwat

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Successfully managing global climate change will require a process of sequential, or iterative, decision‐making, whereby policies and other decisions are revised repeatedly over multiple decades in response to changes in scientific knowledge, technological capabilities, or other conditions. Sequential decisions are required by the combined presence of long lags and uncertainty in climate and energy systems. Climate decision studies have most often examined simple cases of sequential decisions, with two decision points at fixed times and initial uncertainties that are resolved at the second decision point. Studies using this formulation initially suggested that increasing uncertainty favors stronger immediate action, while the …

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Potential Insurance Coverage Implications, Lynn K. Neuner, W. Nicholson Price

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More than 300 lawsuits have already been filed in Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama against BP and other corporations involved in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, including Transocean, Halliburton, and Cameron, with thousands more anticipated. This article briefly addresses the contours of the coverage lawsuit already filed against BP and other coverage disputes we may see in the future.

Crimes On The Gulf, David M. Uhlmann

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The explosion that rocked the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, killed 11 workers and triggered the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. After six weeks of failed efforts to stop the gushing oil and protect the fragile ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico and the communities along its shores, President Obama pledged on June 1 that “if our laws were broken . . . we will bring those responsible to justice.”

Environmental Crime Comes Of Age: The Evolution Of Criminal Enforcement In The Environmental Regulatory Scheme, David M. Uhlmann

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The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 often is considered the first environmental criminal statute because it contains strict liability provisions that make it a misdemeanor to discharge refuse into navigable waters of the United States without a permit. When Congress passed the Rivers and Harbors Act, however, it was far more concerned with preventing interference with interstate commerce than environmental protection. For practical purposes, the environmental crimes program in the United States dates to the development of the modem environmental regulatory system during the 1970s, and amendments to the environmental laws during the 1980s, which upgraded criminal violations of …

Combating Global Climate Change: Why A Carbon Tax Is A Better Response To Global Warming Than Cap And Trade, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, David M. Uhlmann

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Global climate change is the most significant environmental issue facing our nation and the world. There no longer is any question that global warming is occurring. Nor is there any serious debate about whether human activity is the root cause. If we fail to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the next ten to twenty years, we face the possibility of catastrophic environmental harm by the end of this century.

Strange Bedfellows, David M. Uhlmann

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Environmental protection has not been a priority for the Bush administration, but, contrary to popular perception, criminal prosecution of companies and officials accused of breaking environmental laws has flourished.

Useful Global-Change Scenarios: Current Issues And Challenges, Edward A. Parson

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Scenarios are increasingly used to inform global-change debates, but their connection to decisions has been weak and indirect. This reflects the greater number and variety of potential users and scenario needs, relative to other decision domains where scenario use is more established. Global-change scenario needs include common elements, e.g., model-generated projections of emissions and climate change, needed by many users but in different ways and with different assumptions. For these common elements, the limited ability to engage diverse global-change users in scenario development requires extreme transparency in communicating underlying reasoning and assumptions, including probability judgments. Other scenario needs are specific …

The California Greenhouse Gas Waiver Decision And Agency Interpretation: A Response To Galle And Seidenfeld, Nina A. Mendelson

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Professors Brian Galle and Mark Seidenfeld add some important strands to the debate on agency preemption, particularly in their detailed documentation of the potential advantages agencies may possess in deliberating on preemption compared with Congress and the courts. As they note, the quality of agency deliberation matters to two different debates. First, should an agency interpretation of statutory language to preempt state law receive Chevron deference in the courts, as other agency interpretations may, or should some lesser form of deference be given? Second, should a general statutory authorization to an agency to administer a program and to issue rules …

Reflections On Air Capture: The Political Economy Of Active Intervention In The Global Environment; An Editorial Comment, Edward A. Parson

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When global climate change came onto domestic and international policy agendas in the late 1980s, only two types of response were initially considered: reducing emissions by improving efficiencies or switching to lower or non-carbon energy sources; and adapting to the anticipated changes. Since that time the agenda of potential responses has been progressively expanded, principally by adding various ways to intervene in the global carbon cycle or the climate to break the connection between emissions of greenhouse gases and the resultant climate changes. Three types of these “intervening” responses are now, to varying degrees, present in policy debate: biological sequestration …

Preparing For Climatic Change: The Water, Salmon, And Forests Of The Pacific Northwest, Philip W. Mote, Edward A. Parson, Alan F. Hamlet, William S. Keeton, Dennis Lettenmaier, Nathan Mantua, Edward L. Miles, David W. Peterson, David L. Peterson, Richard Slaughter, Amy K. Snover

Articles

The impacts of year-to-year and decade-to-decade climatic variations on some of the Pacific Northwest’s key natural resources can be quantified to estimate sensitivity to regional climatic changes expected as part of anthropogenic global climatic change. Warmer, drier years, often associated with El Niño events and/or the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, tend to be associated with below-average snowpack, streamflow, and flood risk, below-average salmon survival, below-average forest growth, and above-average risk of forest fire. During the 20th century, the region experienced a warming of 0.8 ◦C. Using output from eight climate models, we project a further warming of …

Understanding Climatic Impacts, Vulnerabilities, And Adaptation In The United States: Building A Capacity For Assessment, Edward A. Parson, Robert W. Corell, Eric J. Barron, Virginia Burkett, Anthony Janetos, Linda Joyce, Thomas R. Karl, Michael C. Maccracken, Jerry Melillo, M. Granger Morgan, David S. Schimel, Thomas Wilbanks

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Based on the experience of the U.S. National Assessment, we propose a program of research and analysis to advance capability for assessment of climate impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation options. We identify specific priorities for scientific research on the responses of ecological and socioeconomic systems to climate and other stresses; for improvement in the climatic inputs to impact assessments; and for further development of assessment methods to improve their practical utility to decision-makers. Finally, we propose a new institutional model for assessment, based principally on regional efforts that integrate observations, research, data, applications, and assessment on climate and linked environmental-change issues. …

On The Topology Of Uniform Environmental Standards In A Federal System And Why It Matters (Symposium: Environmental Federalism), James E. Krier

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Uniform standards are much favored among the makers of federal environmental policy in the United States, which is to say, among the members of Congress. By and large-judging at least from the legislation it has enacted-Congress expects the air and water eventually to meet the same minimum levels of quality in every state in the country, and expects each pollution source in any industrial category or subcategory to be controlled just as much as every other such source, notwithstanding the source's location or other peculiar characteristics. There are exceptions to these generalizations, but they are exceptions and not the rule.1 …

Property Rules And Liability Rules: The Cathedral In Another Light, James E. Krier, Stewart J. Schwab

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Ronald Coase's essay on "The Problem of Social Cost" introduced the world to transaction costs, and the introduction laid the foundation for an ongoing cottage industry in law and economics. And of all the law-and-economics scholarship built on Coase's insights, perhaps the most widely known and influential contribution has been Calabresi and Melamed's discussion of what they called "property rules" and "liability rules."' Those rules and the methodology behind them are our subjects here. We have a number of objectives, the most basic of which is to provide a much needed primer for those students, scholars, and lawyers who are …

The End Of The World News (Symposium: Twenty-Five Years Of Environmental Regulation), James E. Krier

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My title, but nothing else, owes to Anthony Burgess.' I like the ambiguity of Burgess's words. They could be a play on what an anchor says when she brings the night's news of the world to a close ("and that's the end of.. ."), or they could be the name of a doomsday periodical, or a headline announcing the bankruptcy of a tabloid, or, at the extreme, a reference to the end of the world. For my purposes, however, they signify the end of an era.

Roundtable Discussion: Science, Environment, And The Law, James E. Krier

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Science, environment, and the law is our topic. The problem of interest to me has to do with risk regulation and, more particularly, with the fact that technical and scientific views of risk differ dramatically from lay or public views. How is this conflict to be managed and resolved? I have to go through my account very quickly, given the time constraint, so let me mention that it is based on an article that sets out my arguments at length.'

Marketable Pollution Allowances (Great Lakes Symposium), James E. Krier

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In March 1993, the EPA auctioned off 150,010 sulfer dioxide emissions permits at the Chicago Board of Trade. The auction brought in $21.4 million and ushered in the Clean Air Act's market-based approach to sulfur dioxide control. Congress created these marketable pollution allowances (MPAs) under Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 19903 to regulate acid rain pollution. While most MPAs were bought by utilities, to be exchanged as a commodity according to need, some MPAs were removed from the market solely to prevent their use by polluters. The Cleveland-based National Healthy Air License Exchange bought one allowance …

The Tragedy Of The Commons, Part Two, James E. Krier

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This symposium is about the idea of "free market environmentalism" in general and the book Free Market Environmentalism, by Terry Anderson and Donald Leal,1 in particular. While I focus chiefly on Anderson and Leal's book, the discussion will necessarily involve the general idea of free market environmentalism as well. The conceit of my tide, which obviously derives from Garrett Hardin's celebrated essay on The Tragedy of the Commons,2 is this: Superficial differences aside, Hardin's essay and Anderson and Leal's book address the same fundamental problem of coordinating human behavior as it affects environmental quality. But both the essay and the …

On Integrated Pollution Control, James E. Krier

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Integrated pollution control, or IPC, can be defined for now as an approach to environmental regulation that "seeks particularly to link air, water, and waste programs. Its concern is institutional changes that reduce total risk to the environment from pollutants." 8 This sounds remarkably appealing, which perhaps explains IPC's recurring popularity. As we shall see, it enjoyed a brief celebrity about twenty years ago, and it is once again in vogue-especially within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Is the Agency's recent interest in IPC a good thing? We worry that it is not. First of all, IPC has an …