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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Vetoing Wetland Permits Under Section 404(C) Of The Clean Water Act: A History Of Inter-Federal Agency Controversy And Reform, Michael Blumm, Elisabeth D. Mering
Vetoing Wetland Permits Under Section 404(C) Of The Clean Water Act: A History Of Inter-Federal Agency Controversy And Reform, Michael Blumm, Elisabeth D. Mering
Michael Blumm
For most of its four-decade history, section 404(c) of the Clean Water Act could have been considered to be a sleeper provision of environmental law. The proviso authorizes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overrule permits for discharges of dredged or fill material issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) where necessary to ensure protection of fish and wildlife habitat, municipal water supplies, and recreational areas against unacceptable adverse effects. This authority of one federal agency to veto the decisions of another federal agency is quite unusual, perhaps unprecedented in environmental law. The exceptional nature of section 404(c) …
An Other History Of Knowledge And Decision In Precautionary Approaches To Sustainability, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay
An Other History Of Knowledge And Decision In Precautionary Approaches To Sustainability, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay
Saptarishi Bandopadhyay
In this paper, I offer an alternative reading of precaution with the hope of recovering the capacity of this ethic to facilitate legal and political decisions. Despite being a popular instrument of international environmental governance, decision-makers continue to understand this principle as reflecting an immemorial and natural instinct for preserving the environment in cases of scientific uncertainty. Such a reading, however, ignores the history and moral basis underlying this principle and thereby renders it obvious, and automatically adaptable to the politics of Sustainable Development. By offering a thicker history of precautionary governance at exemplary moments of ecological crisis I trace …
The Presentment Clause Meets The Suspension Power: The Affordable Care Act’S Long And Winding Road To Implementation, Mitchell Widener
The Presentment Clause Meets The Suspension Power: The Affordable Care Act’S Long And Winding Road To Implementation, Mitchell Widener
Mitchell Widener
The presentment clause MEETs the Suspension Power: The Affordable Care Act’s Long and Winding Road to Implementation
Mitchell J. Widener
Abstract
To enact a law, the Presentment Clause of the Constitution mandates that both Houses of Congress present a bill to the President who either signs it into law or vetoes it. The Founders included this provision to prevent presidents from emulating King James II, who would routinely suspend Parliament’s laws to favor political constituents. Additionally, the Presentment Clause served to enhance the separation-of-powers principle implied in the Constitution.
Within the past year, President Obama has suspended multiple portions of …
The Commons, Capitalism, And The Constitution, George Skouras
The Commons, Capitalism, And The Constitution, George Skouras
George Skouras
Thesis Summary: the erosion of the Commons in the United States has contributed to the deterioration of community and uprooting of people in order to meet the dynamic demands of capitalism. This article suggests countervailing measures to help remedy the situation.
Antimonopoly And The Radical Lochean Origins Of Western Water Law, Michael Blumm
Antimonopoly And The Radical Lochean Origins Of Western Water Law, Michael Blumm
Michael Blumm
This review of David Schorr's book, The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier, maintains that the book is a therapeutic corrective to the standard history of the origins of western water law as celebration of economic efficiency and wealth maximization. Schorr's account convincingly contends that the roots of prior appropriation water law--the "Colorado Doctrine"--lie in distributional justice concerns, not in the supposed efficiency advantages of private property over common property. The goals of the founders of the Colorado doctrine, according to Schorr, were to advance Radical Lochean principles such as widespread distibution of water …
Debating Law's Irrelevance: Legal Scholarship And The Coase Theorem In The 1960s, Steven G. Medema
Debating Law's Irrelevance: Legal Scholarship And The Coase Theorem In The 1960s, Steven G. Medema
Steven G Medema
The paper examines the treatment of the Coase theorem by legal scholars during the 1960s. The analysis demonstrates that it was legal scholars, rather than economists, who took the lead in applying Coase's negotiation result in the legal realm and that the early diffusion of Coase's result in the legal literature is anything but a "Chicago" story. We also observe that legal scholars were interesting in examining the applicability of Coase's result across a wide range of legal issues and, in contrast to economists, who were preoccupied with the efficiency predication of Coase's result, tended to focus on Coase's invariance …