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United States Supreme Court

Georgetown University Law Center

Environmental Law

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Climate Change In The Supreme Court, Lisa Heinzerling Jan 2008

Climate Change In The Supreme Court, Lisa Heinzerling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court confronted the issue of climate change for the first time. The Court held that the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gases and that the agency may not decline to exercise this authority based either on factors not present in the statute or inconclusive gestures toward uncertainty in the science of climate change. I had the privilege of serving as the lead author of the winning briefs in this case. This Article provides an insider's perspective on the choices that went into bringing and …


Human Nature, The Laws Of Nature, And The Nature Of Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus Jan 2005

Human Nature, The Laws Of Nature, And The Nature Of Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The essay is divided into three parts. Part I considers the ways in which the need for environmental law derives from the tendency of human nature to cause adverse environmental consequences and the ways in which the laws of nature make it more difficult to prevent those consequences absent the imposition of external legal rules. Part II describes how our nation's lawmaking institutions are similarly challenged by the laws of nature. This includes a discussion of how the kinds of laws necessary to bridge the gap between human nature and the laws of nature are systematically difficult for our lawmaking …


Environmental Law And The Supreme Court: Three Years Later, Richard J. Lazarus Jan 2002

Environmental Law And The Supreme Court: Three Years Later, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In my Garrison Lecture three years ago, I surveyed the environmental law decisions of the Supreme Court between 1970 and 1999. I commented on which Justices had been more or less influential in shaping the Court's decisions and, even more provocatively (if not foolishly), sought to "score" the individual Justices on their responsiveness to environmental protection concerns based on their votes cast in a subset of those cases. The broader thesis of the lecture, however, was that there is something distinctively "environmental" about environmental law and that the Court's increasing inability to appreciate that dimension was leading to more poorly-reasoned …


Thirty Years Of Environmental Protection Law In The Supreme Court, Richard J. Lazarus Jan 2000

Thirty Years Of Environmental Protection Law In The Supreme Court, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Lectures and Appearances

It is an honor to present a lecture named after Lloyd Garrison and to be here at Pace Law School. It is especially fitting, of course, that the first Garrison Lecture was presented by Pace's own David Sive. Professor Sive, as we all know, worked closely with Garrison on the celebrated Scenic Hudson litigation. Few legal counsel have been so closely identified with the emergence of the environmental law profession during the past three decades. Indeed, if there were such a thing as a legal thesaurus that linked substantive areas of law with lawyers and one looked up "environ-mental law," …