Environmental Law Commons^™

Uncooperative Environmental Federalism 2.0, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

Has the Trump Administration made good on its pledges to reinvigorate cooperative federalism and constrain environmental regulatory overreach by the federal government? Perhaps less than one would think. This paper, prepared for the Hastings Law Journal symposium, “Revolution of Evolution? Administrative Law in the Age of Trump,” provides a critical assessment of the Trump Administration’s approach to environmental federalism. Despite the Administration’s embrace of “cooperative federalism” rhetoric, environmental policy reforms have not consistently embodied a principled approach to environmental federalism in which the state and federal governments are each encouraged to focus resources on areas of comparative advantage.

Reforming Our Wasteful Hazardous Waste Policy, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

Federal hazardous waste regulation and cleanup programs suffer from poor prioritization, insufficient flexibility, high costs, and questionable benefits. Many of these problems are a result of excessive regulatory centralization. With the enactment of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and Comprehensive Emergency Response, Cleanup and Liability Act (CERCLA, aka "Superfund") Congress centralized environmental policy questions that are, in many respects, inherently local in nature. This produced a "mismatch" between those jurisdictions with regulatory primacy and the nature of the environmental problems at issue.

Contamination of soil and groundwater are site-specific, rarely crossing state lines. Due to the local nature …

When Is Two A Crowd: The Impact Of Federal Action On State Environmental Regulation, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

This article seeks to identify the ways in which federal actions can influence state regulatory choices in the context of environmental policy. The federal government may directly influence state policy choices by preempting state policies or by inducing state cooperation through the use of various incentives and penalties for state action. The federal government may indirectly, and perhaps unintentionally, influence state policy choices as well. Federal policies may encourage greater state regulation by reducing the costs of initiating regulatory action or by placing issues on state policy agendas. Federal regulation may also discourage or even "crowd-out" state-level regulatory action by …