Environmental Law Commons^™

A Regulatory Scheme For The Dawn Of Space Tourism, Molly M. Mccue

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Today, companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have successfully launched paying customers into space, forging the future of the space tourism industry. While a growing space tourism industry promotes scientific advancement and opens an activity once reserved for trained astronauts to the public, the industry generates new issues and reveals the vulnerabilities of international space law. This Note explores the history of commercial spaceflight and the international agreements that comprise the current legal regime. It argues that space tourism presents a need for a new international agreement to address three vulnerabilities in the current international regime: environmental protections, protections …

What Happens When The Green New Deal Meets The Old Green Laws?, J. B. Ruhl, James Salzman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The multi-faceted infrastructure goals of the Green New Deal will be impossible to achieve in the desired time frames if the existing federal, state, and local siting and environmental protection statutory regimes are applied. Business, labor, property rights, environmental protection, and social justice interests will use them to grind the Green New Deal to a snail's pace. Using the renewable energy transition as the infrastructure case study, this Essay is a call to arms for the need to design New Green Laws for the Green New Deal. Part I briefly summarizes what we are learning about the pace and magnitude …

The Fatal Failure Of The Regulatory State, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The impact of government policies depends on their design, implementation, and enforcement.! The administrative law literature focuses primarily on matters of regulatory structure.2 Government agencies entrusted with protection of the environment and promotion of health and safety foster these objectives by designing and promulgating regulations that are sometimes quite stringent.' Whether these regulations will in fact generate their intended effects depends on whether they create sufficient economic incentives to discourage risky behavior...

The Article begins by documenting the low values currently placed on life in regulatory enforcement efforts. Part I presents examples involving job safety, food safety, motor-vehicle safety, and …

Ecosystem Services And The Clean Water Act: Strategies For Fitting New Science Into Old Law, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article explores the administrative reform potential that exists for integrating new knowledge about ecosystem services into Clean Water Act (CWA) regulatory programs as an example for all environmental laws. Part II of the Article reviews the relevant general rules of federal administrative law governing agency interpretation of the policy space available under statutory authority for integrating new science into decision making. Part III then explores the strategies an agency such as EPA can use under those rules to integrate the concept of ecosystem services into regulatory programs by searching for statutory provisions to support what I call "direct protection" …

Implementing The New Ecosystem Services Mandate Of The Section 404 Compensatory Mitigation Program--A Catalyst For Advancing Science And Policy, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman, Iris Goodman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

On April 10, 2008, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) jointly published final regulations defining standards and procedures for authorizing compensatory mitigation of impacts to aquatic resources the Corps permits under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (Section 404). Prior to the rule, the Section 404 compensatory mitigation program had been administered under a mish-mash of guidances, inter-agency memoranda, and other policy documents issued over the span of 17 years. A growing tide of policy and science scholarship criticized the program's administration as not accounting for the potential redistribution of ecosystem services that …

The Doha Declaration And Beyond: Giving A Voice To Non-Trade Concerns Within The Wto Trade Regime, Larry A. Dimatteo, Kiren Dosanjh, Paul L. Frantz, Peter Bowal, Clyde Stoltenberg

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been a significant force in the liberalization of trade across international borders since its inception in 1995. Commentators suggest that its reforms have converted the focus of international trade policy from removal of barriers to positive policy-making--a field historically occupied by domestic authorities. And although largely successful in the promotion of international trade, the Authors suggest that the binding provisions of the WTO ignore non-trade concerns such as environmental protection, consumer rights, labor rights, and state sovereignty. The Agreement's inattention to these related concerns is the primary locus of criticism of the WTO, culminating …

Our Better Natures: A Revisionist View Of Joseph Sax's Public Trust Theory Of Environmental Protection,And Some Dark Thoughts On The Possibility Of Law Reform, Richard Delgado

Vanderbilt Law Review

When Professor Joseph Sax wrote his famous Public Trust article in 1970, the environmental movement was in a state of agitation and flux. Commentators were writing about plastic trees, Ways Not to Think About Plastic Trees, and whether we should bestow legal rights on natural objects. The Green Movement took hold in Europe, and in the United States scholars, activists, and ordinary citizens were calling for greater attention to the problems of decreasing quality of life, increasing pollution, and over development of the nation's farm and wilderness lands.

The time was exactly right for Sax's article. Sax proposed a simple,easily …

Asbestos In Schools: The Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act And School Asbestos Litigation, James C. Stanley

Vanderbilt Law Review

Over a decade has passed since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first identified asbestos as a health threat to the nation's school children in 1978. The concern over asbestos in schools prompted numerous responses to this problem, including legislative solutions, litigation, and the birth of a new industry to inspect, control, and abate the hazard. The results have been mixed at best. School officials, legislators, and legal commentators have criticized much of the legislation as ineffective; the litigation has added cases to a legal docket already overburdened by personal injury suits brought by individuals against asbestos manufacturers and liability insurance …