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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Carbon Storage Future Of Public Lands, Tara Righetti, Jesse Richardson, Kris Koski, Sam Taylor
The Carbon Storage Future Of Public Lands, Tara Righetti, Jesse Richardson, Kris Koski, Sam Taylor
Pace Environmental Law Review
To meet the climate and energy goals set forth by the Biden Administration and the Paris Agreement, the United States must dramatically reduce carbon emissions. Use of public lands for carbon dioxide removal activities, including carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), has the potential to advance carbon reduction goals and concurrently provide economic revitalization opportunities to communities dependent on fossil industries. Current federal law presents numerous challenges and opportunities associated with utilization of federal pore space for CCUS. Although federal grant programs and tax incentives encourage deployment of CCUS technologies, legal and land-management issues related to public lands have received …
Indigenizing Grand Canyon, Jason Anthony Robison
Indigenizing Grand Canyon, Jason Anthony Robison
Utah Law Review
The magical place commonly called the “Grand Canyon” is Native space. Eleven tribes hold traditional connections to the canyon according to the National Park Service. This Article is about relationships between these tribes and the agency—past, present, and future. Grand Canyon National Park’s 2019 centennial afforded a valuable opportunity to reflect on these relationships and to envision what they might become. A reconception of the relationships has begun in recent decades that evidences a shift across the National Park System as a whole. This reconception should continue. Drawing on the tribal vision for Bears Ears National Monument, this Article advocates …
U.S. Forest Service V. Cowpasture River Preservation Ass'n., Taylor A. Simpson
U.S. Forest Service V. Cowpasture River Preservation Ass'n., Taylor A. Simpson
Public Land & Resources Law Review
The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the United States Forest Service and Atlantic Coast Pipeline, LLC, a company who planned to construct a natural gas pipeline under a section of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail within the George Washington National Forest. The legal battle sought to clarify whether the United States Forest Service had the authority to grant the pipeline builder a right-of-way across the Appalachian Trail. The Court ruled that the National Park Service holds an easement for administering the Appalachian Trail, but the land over which the trail crosses remains under the jurisdiction of the …
Ecosystem Services And Federal Public Lands: A Quiet Revolution In Natural Resources Management, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman
Ecosystem Services And Federal Public Lands: A Quiet Revolution In Natural Resources Management, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman
University of Colorado Law Review
The major federal public land management agencies (the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Park Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, and Department of Defense) have increasingly adopted a language that did not exist twentyfive years ago-the language of ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are the range of benefits that ecological resources provide to humans, from water purification and pollination to carbon sequestration and wildlife habitat. The scientific discipline advancing the ecosystem services framework arose in the mid-1990s and quickly became a central strategy for fusing ecology and economics research. Despite its ascendance in research communities, the recognition and conservation of ecosystem …
Highway Culverts, Salmon Runs, And The Stevens Treaties: A Century Of Litigating Pacific Northwest Tribal Fishing Rights, Ryan Hickey
Public Land & Resources Law Review
Isaac Stevens, then Superintendent of Indian Affairs and Governor of Washington Territory, negotiated a series of treaties with Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest during 1854 and 1855. A century and a half later in 2001, the United States joined 21 Indian tribes in filing a Request for Determination in the United States District Court for the District of Washington. Plaintiffs alleged the State of Washington had violated those 150-year-old treaties, which remained in effect, by building and maintaining culverts under roads that prevented salmon passage. This litigation eventually reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held in favor …
Collaboration Through Nepa: Achieving A Social License To Operate On Federal Public Lands, Temple Stoellinger, L. Steven Smutko, Jessica M. Western
Collaboration Through Nepa: Achieving A Social License To Operate On Federal Public Lands, Temple Stoellinger, L. Steven Smutko, Jessica M. Western
Public Land & Resources Law Review
As demand and consumption of natural gas increases, so will drilling operations to extract the natural gas on federal public lands. Fueled by the shale gas revolution, natural gas drilling operations are now frequently taking place, not only in the highly documented urban settings, but also on federal public lands with high conservation value. The phenomenon of increased drilling in sensitive locations, both urban and remote, has sparked increased public opposition, requiring oil and gas producers to reconsider how they engage the public. Oil and gas producers have increasingly deployed the concept of a social license to operate to gain …
Public-Private Conservation Agreements And The Greater Sage-Grouse, Justin R. Pidot
Public-Private Conservation Agreements And The Greater Sage-Grouse, Justin R. Pidot
Public Land & Resources Law Review
In 2015, the Obama Administration announced its conservation plans for the greater sage-grouse, an iconic bird of the intermountain west.Political leadership at the time described those plans as the “largest landscape-level conservation effort in U.S. history,”and they served as the foundation for a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (“FWS”) that a listing of the bird was not warranted under the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”). The Trump Administration appears poised to substantially amend the plans, although an array of interested parties have urged that the plans be left intact. Regardless of the outcome of this debate, conservation of …
Streamlining The Production Of Clean Energy: Proposals To Reform The Hydroelectricity Licensing Process, Travis Kavulla, Laura Farkas
Streamlining The Production Of Clean Energy: Proposals To Reform The Hydroelectricity Licensing Process, Travis Kavulla, Laura Farkas
Public Land & Resources Law Review
Hydroelectric power is an efficient and clean source of power. In an era when air emissions dominate public concern about the environmental effects of the energy sector, it is a paradox that among the most highly regulated energy projects are hydroelectric dams, which do not combust fuel. This is partly due to a failure of successive statutory enactments,which have transformed hydroelectric licensing from a regulatory “one-stop shop” with a single regulator, to a process chained to a bewilderingnumber of often conflicting regulatory agencies, often riven with delay. Hydroelectric licensing has also failed because its capacious standard of review encourages special-interest …
Clear As Mud: Recreating Public Water Rights That Already Exist, Kathryn A. Tipple
Clear As Mud: Recreating Public Water Rights That Already Exist, Kathryn A. Tipple
Utah Law Review
“Speculation. Water monopoly. Land monopoly. . . . John Wesley Powell was pretty well convinced that those would be the fruits of a western land policy based on wishful thinking, willfulness, and lousy science.”186 PWR 107 was created to avoid water monopolization through land reservation. However, it would seem that management of public water reserves on federal lands has succumbed to some of John Wesley Powell’s concerns: management has been incomplete, ad hoc, and potentially based on incomplete hydrological data. PWR 107, as well as federal water reserves in general, pits western states against the BLM where there is a …
E-Mail To Rebecca, Dale D. Goble
E-Mail To Rebecca, Dale D. Goble
University of Colorado Law Review
H.L.A. Hart is probably the most important legal theorist in the modern English-speaking world. The intriguing subtitle of Nicola Lacey's intimate biography, "The Nightmare and the Noble Dream, " echoes the name of Hart's 1997 Georgia Law Review paper, in which he identifies two warring, equally inadequate, visions of law in American jurisprudence: the "nightmare" of complete indeterminacy and unbridled judicial discretion and the "noble dream " of a closed, deterministic legal system of judicial restraint. Lacey implies that Hart's life itself was both a nightmare and a noble dream. This book review expands on Lacey's work and suggests how …
Coal Policy--Need It Be The West Against The Rest?, C. Peter Goplerud Iii, Duffy Ruimerman
Coal Policy--Need It Be The West Against The Rest?, C. Peter Goplerud Iii, Duffy Ruimerman
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Article will analyze the legal issues involved in this "West against the rest" conflict. While numerous areas of disagreement exist within the larger picture of Western-federal relations, the Article will focus on two specific issues of present concern. First, the Article will explore the role of the states under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. This section includes an analysis of recent litigation involving regulations promulgated by the Secretary of the Interior relating to the establishment of state mining programs. Second, the Article will address the imposition of state severance taxes on coal, with particular emphasis …
Reflections On The Exclusionary Zoning Of American Nature, A.E. Keir Nash
Reflections On The Exclusionary Zoning Of American Nature, A.E. Keir Nash
Michigan Law Review
Joseph Sax's Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks deserves more serious scrutiny than does the typical pro-wilderness treatise about the optimum future of our nation's public lands. That is because beneath its elegant form lies a unique argument. Sax's stated central aim is to test the core "preservationist" position concerning nonbusiness use of public lands to determine whether it is a position that Congress, administrative agencies, and the public "should be inclined to follow" (p. 3). The question is, given the "enormous growth of recreation in recent years" (p. 2), whether the national parks, forests, and deserts should …
National Parks And Self-Restraint, Peter Steinhart
National Parks And Self-Restraint, Peter Steinhart
Michigan Law Review
A Review of Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks by Joseph L. Sax
Improved Policy Making For The Multiple Use Of Public Lands, Christopher J. Dunsky
Improved Policy Making For The Multiple Use Of Public Lands, Christopher J. Dunsky
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The purpose of this article is to analyze the failure of past legislative attempts to define public land policy effectively, to examine current proposals for change, and to present an alternative proposal for a clearer statutory definition of policy.