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Water Law

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Selected Works

Environmental Law--Snail Darter

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Classic Lessons From A Little Fish In A Pork Barrel - Featuring The Notorious Story Of The Endangered Snail Darter And The Tva's Last Dam, Zygmunt J.B. Plater Jul 2013

Classic Lessons From A Little Fish In A Pork Barrel - Featuring The Notorious Story Of The Endangered Snail Darter And The Tva's Last Dam, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Canaries are small, fragile, sensitive creatures weighing no more than 20 grams, about seven-tenths of an ounce. They have become a familiar and significant metaphor, however, due to the important role they played as vivid warning indicators of substantial threats to human welfare. Because canaries are extremely sensitive to the presence of methane and carbon monoxide—deadly but odorless gases that seep from deep coal deposits—miners in England and the U.S. carried canaries in little cages along with them as they worked in underground coal seams. When the canaries began to sway and slump noticeably on their perches, the miners could …


Endangered Species Act Lessons Over 30 Years, And The Legacy Of The Snail Darter, A Small Fish In A Pork Barrel, Zygmunt J.B. Plater Oct 2011

Endangered Species Act Lessons Over 30 Years, And The Legacy Of The Snail Darter, A Small Fish In A Pork Barrel, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Why is it – amidst the flood of environmental statutes that poured into the law books and national consciousness in the remarkable decade of the 1970s – that the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) stands out as quite uniquely different? This Essay briefly surveys the ESA’s differentness, its special political context, the citizen suit of great notoriety that fired up the ESA’s political hotseat back in 1975, and what has changed and what has not in the years since that first eco-legal outburst.


The Snail Darter, The Tellico Dam, And Sustainable Democracy — Lessons For The Next President From A Classic Environmental Law Controversy., Zygmunt J.B. Plater Oct 2011

The Snail Darter, The Tellico Dam, And Sustainable Democracy — Lessons For The Next President From A Classic Environmental Law Controversy., Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

This presentation was the product of an invitation to speak at a symposium for students and faculty from a variety of different non-law departments at the University of Tennessee, where in 1973 I had started what became a six-year legal campaign to divert the Tennessee Valley Authority from impounding the last flowing 33 miles of the Little Tennessee River behind TVA’s Tellico Dam.


Reflected In A River: Agency Accountability And The Tva Tellico Dam Case, Zygmunt J.B. Plater Oct 2011

Reflected In A River: Agency Accountability And The Tva Tellico Dam Case, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Legal history is usually written from one of two time perspectives: as a narrative of events and changing conditions over a span of years or as an extended exploration of one fertile moment in time. In examining the intriguing entity known as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), this article draws upon that chronological history to some extent. To a greater extent, however, it focuses upon revealing moments in the last six years of the long-running battles over completion of the TVA’s Tellico dam, which finally flooded the last remaining stretch of the Little Tennessee River Valley in the spring of …