Law Commons^™

Beyond Eco-Imperialism: An Environmental Justice Critique Of Free Trade, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Faculty Articles

The article contributes to the trade and environment literature by assessing the claim that industrialized country proposals to integrate environmental protection into the WTO trade regime constitute environmental imperialism - the imposition of industrialized country values and preferences on less powerful nations. This claim is usually based on two distinct premises. The first is that environmental protection is a luxury that poor countries can ill afford. The second is that wealthy countries have played a leadership role in the protection of the global environment. The article questions these assumptions. It argues that environmental protection is essential to well-being of the …

Thinking Globally And Acting Locally: Reflections About The Possible Role Of "Globalization" In The Evolution Of Seqra, David L. Markell

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Symposium Introduction: A Conversation On Federalism And The States: The Balancing Act Of Devolution, David L. Markell, Martha F. Davis

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Chevron's Domain, Thomas W. Merrill, Kristin E. Hickman

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's decision in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Counsel, Inc. dramatically expanded the circumstances in which courts must defer to agency interpretations of statutes. The idea that deference on questions of law is sometimes required was not new. Prior to Chevron, however, courts were said to have such a duty only when Congress expressly delegates authority to an agency "to define a statutory term or prescribe a method of executing a statutory provision.^" Outside this narrow context, whether courts would defer to an agency's legal interpretation depended upon multiple factors that courts evaluated in …

Judicial Review Under Seqra: A Statistical Study, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly 2000 judicial opinions were issued under the State Environmental Quality Review Act ("SEQRA") between its enactment in 1975 and the end of 2000. Almost 700 were issued from 1990 (when the author began undertaking an annual review of SEQRA cases for the New York Law Journal) through 2000. These numbers are large enough to serve as a basis for a statistically valid review of case outcomes.

This article is divided into five parts. Part I presents statistics on the SEQRA cases. Part II reviews the history of how the Court of Appeals has decided SEQRA cases. Part III …

The Miccosukee Indians And Environmental Law: A Confederacy Of Hope, William H. Rodgers, Jr.

Articles

Two legal orphans have found each other. The older one is "Indian Law," a confused, embarrassing, and twisted body of legal rules that "explain" the relationships between the United States and its native peoples. The newer one is "Environmental Law," a complex and jumbled stew of cases and statutes that "prescribe" proper behavior between modern Americans and the natural world.

Both these children of the law are suspected of subversion—the one is tainted by advocates of separate sovereignties, the other by critics of the American way of life. For Native Americans and environmentalists, their recent legal merger is a confederacy …

The Metamorphosis Of Western Water Policy: Have Federal Laws And Local Decisions Eclipsed The States’ Role?, David H. Getches

Publications

No abstract provided.

Federal Regulation Of Isolated Wetlands After Swancc, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

This past January the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Clean Water Act (CWA) did not authorize the federal government to prohibit a landfill operator from filling isolated ponds on its property merely because the ponds were used as habitat by migratory birds. The National Association of Home Builders claimed that the decision in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (SWANCC) was "a major legal victory for home builders and other private property owners." Critics of the SWANCC decision argued that it jeopardizes "perhaps a fifth of the water bodies in the United …

Private Plaintiffs, Public Rights: Article Ii And Environmental Citizen Suits, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

This Article will focus on the Take Care Clause of Article II, the most serious of the Article II challenges to the environmental citizen suit provisions. Justice Scalia and legal commentators have argued that Article II prohibits a citizen from suing to enforce federal laws unless the citizen has suffered a concrete and personal ("individuated") injury as a result of the action that he is challenging. Professor Cass Sunstein and others have dissented, and have suggested that Congress can authorize citizens to sue to enforce federal laws even when the citizens have not suffered individuated injuries.

The first Part of …

Book Review Of Eco-Pragmatism: Making Sensible Environmental Decisions In An Uncertain World, Lynda L. Butler

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Protecting Ecosystems Under The Endangered Species Act, William Snape

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

INTRODUCTION: CAN THE TORTOISE STILL BEAT THE HARE? Can the tortoise even enter the race with its fabled competitor? Unfortunately, the desert tortoise is threatened with extinction and, consequently, most United States populations of this biological wonder are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA or Act) as a result of rampant habitat loss and other human causes. As desert tortoise numbers have declined, the species has also suffered from disease and predation.

The Social Meaning Of Environmental Command And Control, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

...This essay draws on the new social norms literature to examine one of the possible reasons for the public misperceptions about the sources of the remaining environmental problems. The essay suggests that one of the insights of the social norms literature, the influence of social meaning on social norms, may shed light on these misperceptions and may enrich our understanding of the difficulties encountered by efforts to control second generation sources. In particular, this essay examines two principal social meanings that appear to have been conveyed by the command and control system. The first social meaning is the conventional notion …

David Ross Brower And Nature's Laws, Nicholas A. Robinson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

“We're not blindly opposed to progress. We're opposed to blind progress.” These words summed up the style and power of David R. Brower. Indelibly, he chiseled toe hold after toe hold on an arduous climb across the rock face of the commercial forces driven to seek short-term gain from natural resources and oblivious to the longer-term costs to the Earth that the ecological sciences would chronicle but that economists would disregard as mere “externalities” in their classical market models. As Brower campaigned to protect the wilderness of North America and the Earth, through his sheer conviction and abundant eloquence, he …

Direct Environmental Standing For Chartered Conservation Corporations, Karl S. Coplan

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article suggests that, as an antidote to the ever-tightening restrictions on individual environmental standing, a state may charter a not-for-profit corporation organized to protect a particular environmental resource, giving the corporation a non-exclusive portion of the State's interest in enforcing applicable environmental protections. The dichotomy between not-for-profit organizations that may litigate only as the representative of individual members' interests, and business corporations that assert their own direct economic interests, may seem natural to our late-twentieth-century sensibility, but is not founded in original intent. The framers of Article III, which grants jurisdiction over “cases and controversies” to the federal courts, …

The Epa's Nepa Duties And Ecosystem Services, Robert L. Fischman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Endangered Species Information: Access And Control, Robert L. Fischman, Vicky J. Meretsky

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, Arctic Council And Multilateral Environmental Initiatives: Tinkering While The Arctic Marine Environment Totters, David Vanderzwaag, Robert Huebert, Stacey Ferrara

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The Arctic marine environment is not pristine, as commonly imagined, but is facing numerous pressures,' the most serious arguably coming from outside the region. Melting of sea ice, linked to global warming, threatens the long-term survival of various species including polar bears and has potential to seriously disrupt ocean currents. Persistent organic pollutants (POPs), including pesticides, industrial compounds and combustion by-products, are transported via air and water currents from regions outside the Arctic and become concentrated in the fatty tissues of animals." The pollutants threaten not only the well being of wildlife but the health of northern residents heavily dependent …

Integration & Biocomplexity, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

Sustainable development (SD) is premised on the inescapable and integral role played by humans in shaping and impacting the natural world and has been recognized as a foundational norm of international environmental law and policy. Ecologicalism - an outlook that embraces a comprehensive approach to interdependent natural and human systems - provides the conceptual underpinnings for a creative and integrated environmental management philosophy for implementing SD. This Article argues that the daunting task of defining and applying such an integrated approach and philosophy to the multiple interacting changes affecting planetary life support systems can benefit from the U.S. experience in …

Legal Systems, Decisionmaking, And The Science Of Earth's Systems: Procedural Missing Links, Nicholas A. Robinson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Decisionmakers disregard scientific findings regarding environmental conditions, despite recommendations of the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Agenda 21 that science should provide a foundation for sustainable development. Although environmental degradation trends continue to exacerbate, decisionmakers address only selected issues. This Article examines an analytic paradigm for evaluating when decisionmakers are ready to address a problem and describes the catalytic role that scientific information can serve in prompting remedial action. Unless systematic procedures require evaluation of environmental scientific findings in the normal course of decisionmaking, science will continue to be ignored. One hallmark of Environmental Law has been to fashion such procedures, …

Legislative Innovation In State Brownfields Redevelopment Programs, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

States throughout the country have created legislation and administrative programs to encourage the cleanup and redevelopment of urban brownfield land. In part, these efforts respond to the federal government's recent focus on the issue. However, leadership in method and approach has come, not from the federal government, but from the states. States have approached the cleanup and redevelopment of contaminated land in a variety of ways, some choosing to create voluntary cleanup programs, others imposing mandatory cleanup programs, and still others using combinations of these approaches. Regardless of method, however, the push to clean brownfield land is grounded in a …

Executive Orders And Presidential Commands: Presidents Riding To The Rescue Of The Environment, William H. Rodgers, Jr.

Articles

Presidential executive orders are legal and political documents. They are also uniquely personal utterances of the president and the administration. The right words at the appropriate time can motivate and move the human spirit, and they can link this president and this moment to the strongest of ideas. Being personal and tending to the heroic, the executive order can thus be perceived as accomplishing a great public good.

This article will explore the pros and cons of the executive order tool. I will then evaluate a number of executive orders that have impacted contemporary environmental policy. I will conclude by …

It's Been 4380 Days And Counting Since Exxon Valdez: Is It Time To Change The Oil Pollution Act Of 1990, Browne C. Lewis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The first Part of this Article examines the liability scheme that existed prior to the EXXON VALDEZ oil spill. In the second Part, the Article analyzes the liability scheme that was created by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA). The final Part of the Article evaluates whether the OPA's liability scheme would be able to effectively deal with an oil spill of the magnitude of the EXXON VALDEZ oil spill.

Regulation By Bootstrap: Contingent Management Of Hazardous Wastes Under The Resource Conservation And Recovery Act, Jeffrey M. Gaba

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In the last few years, EPA has increasingly employed the questionable technique of “contingent management” to regulate wastes under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) in order to limit the costs and avoid the stigma of hazardous waste classification. Through the technique of contingent management, EPA has exempted materials from classification as hazardous waste on the condition that the materials are managed in the particular manner specified in the regulation. The ultimate bootstrap, contingent management allows EPA to regulate non-hazardous wastes over which it has no statutory jurisdiction. Perhaps more troubling, contingent management allows EPA to avoid the …

South Camden And Environmental Justice: Substance, Procedure, And Politics, Jeffrey M. Gaba

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

It’S All About What You Know: The Specific Intent Standard Should Govern "Knowing" Violations Of The Clean Water Act, Randall S. Abate, Dayna E. Mancuso

Journal Publications

Part I of this Article examines the historical and conceptual foundations of the specific intent standard as applied both outside and within the environmental law context. Part II addresses the historical and conceptual foundations of the general intent standard, also outside and within the environmental law context. Part III reviews the history of the conflict between application of the specific intent and general intent standards in prosecutions for knowing violations of the Clean Water Act. Part IV presents arguments that support application of the specific intent standard to knowing violation cases under section 309(c)(2)(A) of the CWA. Part V analyzes …

Cleaning Up The Tracks: Superfund Meets Rails-To-Trails, Clifford J. Villa

Faculty Scholarship

For more than one hundred years, railroad cars rumbled and roared along tracks in the Coeur d'Alene River Basin, serving the mining industry in the Panhandle of northern Idaho. As in many parts of the American West, the history of railroads in northern Idaho largely reflects the history of mining in the region. The first gold was discovered in this area in 1883, the same year that the area saw its first line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In 1885, the Bunker Hill mine was established near the present town of Kellogg. Four years later, the first rail line of …

Highways And Bi-Ways For Environmental Justice, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the past, present, and future of the environmental justice movement as illustrated by the highway between Selma and Montgomery in Alabama and the highway system surrounding the City of Atlanta in neighboring Georgia. The essay is divided into three parts. The first part describes environmental justice, seeking both to place it in a broader historical perspective and to discuss how it relates to civil rights law and environmental law. The second part undertakes a closer examination of the challenges presented by efforts to fashion positive law to address environmental justice norms. This …

The Clean Air Act And The Constitution, Lisa Heinzerling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the summer of 1997, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) strengthened the air quality standards for two air pollutants, particulate matter and ozone, based on mounting scientific evidence of the harmfulness of these pollutants at levels allowed by the existing standards. With respect to particulate matter (PM), the agency found that numerous epidemiological studies had established an association between PM levels and premature deaths in humans, especially in the elderly population. Indeed, one study on which the EPA relied had found that approximately 60,000 premature deaths in the United States alone could be attributed, annually, to particulate matter. The scientific …

The Greening Of America And The Graying Of United States Environmental Law: Reflections On Environmental Law’S First Three Decades In The United States, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this article is to begin to place the developments of the past few decades in historical perspective. To that end, the article is divided into three parts, roughly corresponding to the final three decades of the past century. The first part of the article describes the origins of U.S. environmental law, focusing primarily on its first decade from 1970 through 1980. The second part examines how U.S. environmental laws have since evolved, focusing primarily on their second decade (the 1980s), which was a period of tremendous expansion for environmental law. Finally, the third part considers future trends …

Reflections On Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental justice is a very hot topic. Yesterday's New York Times on the front page of the Metropolitan section had a story stating: Mid-Sized Plants Headed to Poor Areas. The story stated, "The Pataki administration acknowledges in its own study that the electric generators that it wants to install around New York City would go into poor heavily minority communities, a finding that supports some of the arguments of the project's opponents. This is quoting an unreleased environmental justice analysis that may or may not be valid, but it certainly shows how hot a topic it is. This morning …