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Environmental Law

Selected Works

Erin Ryan

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Paper Tiger Gets Teeth: Developments In Chinese Environmental Law, Erin Ryan Mar 2014

The Paper Tiger Gets Teeth: Developments In Chinese Environmental Law, Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan

This very short essay reports on the 2014 amendments to China’s Environmental Protection Law, following a series of internationally reported air and water pollution crises leading to unprecedented public protests. The changes promise more meaningful oversight of industrial pollution and harsher penalties for violations, targeting not only polluters but officials who fail to enforce applicable regulations against them. The amendments also empower certain non-governmental organizations to bring environmental litigation on behalf of the public. Official news accounts openly acknowledge the government’s hope that increased public access to legal redress will reduce the growing trend of mass environmental protests. These are …

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The Elaborate Paper Tiger: Environmental Enforcement And The Rule Of Law In China, Erin Ryan Dec 2013

The Elaborate Paper Tiger: Environmental Enforcement And The Rule Of Law In China, Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan

In recent decades, the eyes of the world have been trained on China’s remarkable feats of rapid economic development. Yet the enormous environmental toll associated with China’s growth has also drawn global attention, as Chinese air and water quality plummet to historic lows. Epic levels of environmental degradation have fueled a growing domestic consensus that China must do better at reconciling these competing goals. This article reviews the contemporary challenges facing the second wave of environmental governance in China (with an addendum addressing important environmental law amendments enacted as it went to press). In the first wave of environmental governance, …

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Negotiating Federalism, Erin Ryan Dec 2010

Negotiating Federalism, Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan

Bridging the fields of federalism and negotiation theory, Negotiating Federalism analyzes how public actors navigate difficult federalism terrain by negotiating directly with counterparts across state-federal lines. In contrast to the stylized, zero-sum model of federalism that dominates political discourse and judicial doctrine, it demonstrates that the boundary between state and federal power is negotiated on scales large and small, on an ongoing basis. The Article is also the first to recognize the procedural tools that bilateral federalism bargaining offers to supplement unilateral federalism interpretation in contexts of jurisdictional overlap. The Article begins by situating its inquiry within the central federalism …

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Palazzolo, The Public Trust, And The Property Owner’S Reasonable Expectations: Takings And The South Carolina Marsh Island Bridge Debate, Erin Ryan Dec 2005

Palazzolo, The Public Trust, And The Property Owner’S Reasonable Expectations: Takings And The South Carolina Marsh Island Bridge Debate, Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan

South Carolina recently promulgated new guidelines regulating the State’s consideration of requests by private marsh island owners to build bridges for vehicular access through publicly owned marsh and tidelands. Many thousands of these islands hug the South Carolina coast, but they are surrounded by tidelands subject to South Carolina’s formidable public trust doctrine, which obligates the State to manage submerged lands and waterways for the benefit of the public. This piece evaluates the relationship between the public trust doctrine and the takings subtext to the debate over the new guidelines – a relationship that has become particularly interesting in the …

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