Law Commons^™

Structured To Fail: Lessons From The Trump Administration’S Faulty Pandemic Planning And Response, Alejandro E. Camacho, Robert L. Glicksman

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The Trump Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder that poorly designed government can be a matter of life and death. This article explains how the Administration’s careless and delayed response to the crisis was made immeasurably worse by its confused and confusing reallocation of authority to perform or supervise tasks essential to reducing the virus’s ravages.

After exploring the rationale for and impact of prior federal reorganizations responding to public health crises, the article shows how a combination of unnecessary and unhelpful overlapping authority and a thoughtless mix of centralized and decentralized authority contributed to the …

Improving Generic Drug Approval At The Fda, Kathleen Craddock

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Generic drugs are the store-brand cereal of the drug world. While they lack the vibrant colors of and exciting commercials behind name brands, generics are still effective. Most importantly, for some people, they make the difference between accessing essential treatment and going without. Getting generics to market as quickly as possible means fewer people will cut pills in half or skip doses to save money, which also saves billions of dollars across the U.S. health system. Because a new generic does not offer lifesaving changes for people with rare or complicated diseases, generics lack the “cultural capture of rhetoric about …

Protecting Human Health And Stewarding The Environment: An Essay Exploring Values In U.S. Environmental Protection Law, Tracy Bach

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The purpose of this conference is to explore “the relationship between environmental protection and public health and how it should inform our efforts to become better stewards of the environment.” No one would disagree with the assertion that during the last forty years of federal environmental protection, air and water quality have improved and led to concomitant improvements in human health. Exploring the contours of this “relationship,” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy said in her keynote speech that “[t]he thing is, the word ‘relationship’ is too neutral. The link between the health of our planet and the health …

Environmental Law, Public Health, And The Values Conundrum, David M. Uhlmann

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

In September 1996, when I was nearing the end of my sixth year as a Justice Department environmental crimes prosecutor, one of my colleagues sent me an email that there was a “good-sounding RCRA [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] knowing endangerment case developing in Idaho.” A twenty-year-old man named Scott Dominguez had collapsed inside a storage tank at an Idaho fertilizer manufacturing facility called Evergreen Resources. Mr. Dominguez could not be rescued for nearly an hour, because firefighters who responded to the scene did not know what was in the tank and what safety precautions they needed to take before …

Keynote Remarks At The University Of Michigan Environmental Law And Public Health Conference, Gina Mccarthy

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The following are the prepared remarks delivered at the University of Michigan Law School’s 2013 Environmental Law and Public Health Conference on September 26, 2013.