Law Commons^™

The Public Trust Doctrine And The Climate Crisis: Panacea Or Platitude?, Joseph Regalia

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Over a year of shutting down the global economy during the COVID pandemic achieved about .01 degrees of improvement in global warming. Not even a drop in the bucket. We continue to face a monumental climate crisis. And of the many ways that crisis threatens our environment, winnowing water resources is one of the scariest. One solution that many scholars have turned to is the public trust doctrine. At first blush, this doctrine sounds like a panacea for water management problems: When our water resources are threatened enough that current and future citizen’s access to it is in peril, the …

The Grid And The Grouse: Cooperative Federal-State Conservation Planning In The Ages Of Obama And Trump, Bret C. Birdsong

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This essay reviews two habitat conservation and planning initiatives undertaken by the Obama administration that relied on and envisioned extraordinary cooperation between the federal and state governments in order to overcome, or at least lessen, the disruptive impacts of jurisdictional lines on effective and comprehensive habitat conservation. These initiatives are the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) in California and the sage grouse conservation planning effort across eleven western states. Both initiatives embraced the common sense goal of coordinating development and conservation management across jurisdictional boundaries. In both initiatives, however, cooperation was motivated and sustained by specific legal and policy …

Mapping The Human Right To Water On The Colorado River, Bret C. Birdsong

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Colorado River systems-both ecological and legal-are facing a coming crisis. The river snakes its way from the Rocky Mountain crest to the Gulf of California, draining 245,000 square miles encompassing parts of seven of the United States ("U.S.") and two Mexican states. The river and its tributaries provide drinking water for growing population of thirty million in an even larger area because some of its water is diverted to serve out-of-basin demands in both the U.S. and Mexico. Aside from bringing life-sustaining water to people for personal use, it provides irrigation water for some of the most valuable agricultural lands …

Séances, Ciénegas, And Slop: Can Collaboration Revive The Colorado Delta?, Bret C. Birdsong

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Issues of transboundary allocation of water resources and its environmental effects are, virtually by their very nature, ones that require collaborative solutions. In the absence of international law norms and institutions to resolve sovereign claims to the waters of international rivers, much of the decisionmaking is left to the collaborative, or negotiated, arrangements between the countries involved and their respective domestic stakeholders. This Article examines collaborative efforts to allocate waters in the Colorado River basin as they relate to the lowest reaches of that great river, the ecologically important but very fragile Colorado River Delta in Mexico. Collaboration is sometimes …

Justice Scalia's Footprints On The Public Lands, Bret C. Birdsong

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This article explores Justice Scalia's views of judicial review of administrative action, as revealed in his writings on public land law, as both a scholar and a Supreme Court justice. It examines and explains why Professor Scalia favored judicial review of public land administration while Justice Scalia seems to abhor it. In a sweeping law review article published in 1970, Professor Scalia argued that the doctrine of sovereign immunity historically did not apply in public lands cases. On the Court he has penned two of the most significant decisions addressing judicial review of public lands administration, each of them imposing …

Road Rage And R.S. 2477: Judicial And Administrative Responsibility For Resolving Road Claims On Public Land, Bret C. Birdsong

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The past decade has seen the D-4 Caterpillar bulldozer become a significant tool for those seeking to challenge federal land management agencies' authority to protect resources federal lands by reducing access. The power of the bulldozer is both symbolic and pragmatic. It cuts an iconographic image of local officials standing up against federal control over vast areas of land in the rural west. But it also, in many cases, provokes litigation, allowing claims to property rights to receive judicial attention that might otherwise evade them.

Underlying each of these protagonist's legal positions, if not their motivations, is a right-of-way grant …

No More Parking Lots: How The Tax Code Keeps Trees Out Of A Tree Museum And Paradise Unpaved, Francine J. Lipman

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No abstract provided.

Adjucating Sustainability: New Zealand's Environment Court, Bret C. Birdsong

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New Zealand's Resource Management Act of 1991 (“RMA”) placed the island nation on the world's cutting edge of environmental management by making sustainability the law of the land. The RMA also presents an opportunity to examine a less heralded New Zealand innovation in environmental governance: a specialized, expert court that is focused exclusively on resolving environmental disputes. The Environment Court is a critical institution in New Zealand's effort to move toward sustainable management of the environment. Exercising broad powers to review most of the fundamental issues arising under the RMA, the Court is the primary arbiter of whether activities and …

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Recent case developments in Insurance Law in the years 1999 and 2000.

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Recent case developments in Insurance law in the year 1998-1999.

Unreason In Action: A Case Study In The Wrong Approach To Construing The Liability Insurance Pollution Exclusion, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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For more than twenty-five years, a significant component of the scholarly commentary on insurance law has focused on the so-called “reasonable expectations doctrine” enunciated by then-Professor (now Judge) Robert Keeton in his justly celebrated 1970 article. The reasonable expectations principle made a seemingly sudden emergence with the appearance of Keeton's article and has held particular attraction to academics while simultaneously prompting resistance from elements of the bench and bar, and particularly from the insurance industry. The doctrine's life to date can be described as one of early growth followed by subsequent retreat and dilution, with continuing controversy.

However, despite the …

Reason And Pollution: Construing The "Absolute" Pollution Exclusion In Context And In Light Of Its Purpose And Party Expectations, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Responding to the flurry of environmental coverage litigation over the application of the “sudden and accidental” pollution exclusion, the insurance industry during the mid-1980s largely adopted new standard pollution exclusion language for commercial general liability (CGL) policies. Since the mid-1980s, the standard form CGL has included the so-called absolute pollution exclusion, which provides that the insurance does not apply to bodily injury or property damage “arising out of the actual, alleged or threatened discharge, dispersal, seepage, migration, release, or escape of pollutants.” A “pollutant” is defined as “any solid, liquid, gaseous or thermal irritant or contaminant, including smoke, vapor, soot, …

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Recent case developments in Insurance Law in years 1998 and 1999.

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Recent case developments in Insurance law in the year 1998.