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Full-Text Articles in Law
Environmental Law's Heartland And Frontiers, Todd Aagaard
Environmental Law's Heartland And Frontiers, Todd Aagaard
Todd S Aagaard
The locus of innovation moving forward is likely to be outside of the traditional domain of environmental law — in areas that are at the frontiers of environmental law, but in the heart of related fields such as energy law, corporate social responsibility, and insurance. At the same time, environmental law’s heartland will continue to dominate the regulation of environmental harms for the foreseeable future. The future of environmental law therefore will be determined by a dialectic relationship between the heartland and frontiers of environmental law; each playing its own crucial role in the development of the field, in tension …
Environmental Harms, Use Conflicts, And Neutral Baselines In Environmental Law, Todd Aagaard
Environmental Harms, Use Conflicts, And Neutral Baselines In Environmental Law, Todd Aagaard
Todd S Aagaard
Accounts of environmental law that rely on concepts of environmental harm and environmental protection oversimplify the tremendous variety of uses of environmental resources and the often complex relationships among those uses. Such approaches are analytically unclear and, more importantly, insert hidden normativity into putatively descriptive claims. Instead of thinking about environmental law in terms of preventing environmental harm, environmental problems can be understood more specifically and more meaningfully as disputes over conflicting uses of environmental resources. This Article proposes a use-conflict framework as a means of acquiring a deeper understanding of environmental problems and lawmaking without favoring any particular normative …
A Functional Approach To Risks And Uncertainties Under Nepa, Todd Aagaard
A Functional Approach To Risks And Uncertainties Under Nepa, Todd Aagaard
Todd S Aagaard
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) mandates that federal agencies evaluate the environmental impacts of their proposed actions. This requires agencies to make ex ante predictions about environmental consequences that often involve a significant degree of factual risk or uncertainty. Considerable controversy exists regarding how agencies should address such risks and uncertainties. Current NEPA law adopts a largely ad hoc approach that lacks coherence and analytical rigor. Some environmentalists and legal scholars have called for a greater emphasis on worst-case analysis in environmental planning, especially after the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the meltdowns …
Regulatory Overlap, Overlapping Legal Fields, And Statutory Discontinuities, Todd S. Aagaard
Regulatory Overlap, Overlapping Legal Fields, And Statutory Discontinuities, Todd S. Aagaard
Todd S Aagaard
Lawmakers and scholars alike criticize regulatory overlap on the ground that giving administrative agencies overlapping jurisdiction leads to duplicative or conflicting regulation which is inefficient and unduly burdensome. This Article challenges this orthodox account of regulatory overlap through examination of six case studies in which the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have managed their jurisdictional overlap so as to create regulatory synergy rather than dysfunction. Although this Article is not the first to argue that regulatory overlap may improve the effectiveness of regulatory programs, the case studies examined here highlight two important aspects of regulatory …
Environmental Law As A Legal Field: An Inquiry In Legal Taxonomy, Todd S. Aagaard
Environmental Law As A Legal Field: An Inquiry In Legal Taxonomy, Todd S. Aagaard
Todd S Aagaard
This Article examines the classification of the law into legal fields, first generally and then by specific examination of the field of environmental law. We classify the law into fields to find and to create patterns, which render the law coherent and understandable. A legal field is a group of situations unified by a pattern or set of patterns that is both common and distinctive to the field. We can conceptualize a legal field as the interaction of four underlying constitutive dimensions of the field: (1) a factual context that gives rise to (2) certain policy tradeoffs, which are in …