Natural Resources Law Commons^™

The Tyranny Of Plastics: How Society Of Plastics, Inc. V. County Of Suffolk Prevents New Yorkers From Protecting Their Environment And How They Could Be Liberated From Its Unreasonable Standing Requirements, Albert K. Butzel, Ned Thimmayya

Pace Environmental Law Review

Ever since the Court of Appeals of New York issued its holding in the landmark case Society of Plastics Industry, Inc. v. County of Suffolk, citizen oversight of government-approved and government projects with environmental implications has suffered curtailment inconsistent with the objectives of the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA). At the center of the conflict between SEQRA and citizen enforcement are the restrictive standing requirements formulated by Society of Plastics, which include the demand that a petitioner demonstrate harm distinct from injury to the general public. Not only does such a prerequisite for consideration of a case's merits ignore …

Beef Products, Inc. V. Abc News: (Pink) Slimy Enough To Determine The Constitutionality Of Agricultural Disparagement Laws?, Nicole C. Sasaki

Pace Environmental Law Review

This Comment analyzes the likelihood of whether BPI’s case against ABC News will be decided on the merits, whether South Dakota’s agricultural disparagement statute will be upheld as constitutional, and thus the likelihood that other states’ statutes will be struck down, thereby preserving the public’s freedom to question and criticize the safety of our food system. First, Part I offers a brief introduction to agricultural disparagement laws, their historical application, and BPI’s pending lawsuit. Next, Part II reviews the context of the enactment of agricultural disparagement laws, summarizes the common elements of these laws, and discusses Texas Beef Group v. …

Innovations In Energy And Climate Policy: Lessons From Vermont, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Alex Gilbert, Brian Thomson

Pace Environmental Law Review

We ask in this article: how can planners and policymakers replicate Vermont’s energy and climate policies? We begin by explaining the research methods utilized for this article—mainly research interviews with a pool of experts, coupled with a targeted literature review. We then analyze the success of Vermont energy policy across four areas: energy efficiency, renewable energy, the smart grid, and energy governance. The following sections first explain how Vermont accomplished these successes, next identify a number of remaining barriers and elements of Vermont’s approach that may not be replicable, and finally present the article’s conclusions.

Fraud And First Amendment Protections Of False Speech: How United States V. Alvarez Impacts Constitutional Challenges To Ag-Gag Laws, Larissa U. Liebmann

Pace Environmental Law Review

This article first explains the background and functions of undercover investigations of agricultural production facilities, and explains the bases upon which states pass laws intended to prevent these investigations. It then gives a background of research already conducted on the constitutionality of Ag-Gag laws, and examines the relevance of the Supreme Court case Alvarez. Based on the analysis provided in Alvarez, the article demonstrates that Ag-Gag laws would not be exempt from heightened First Amendment scrutiny as fraud statutes. Moreover, it demonstrates that, in particular, the Iowa and Utah Ag-Gag laws would not survive the heightened scrutiny outlined in Alvarez.

Animal Agriculture Laws On The Chopping Block: Comparing United States And Brazil, Elizabeth Bennett

Pace Environmental Law Review

Brazil and the United States are among the largest producers and exporters of livestock in the world. This raises important animal rights and environmental concerns. While many of the impacts of industrial animal agriculture are similar in Brazil and the United States, there are key differences in the effects on animals and the environment. The variations between Brazil and the United States are due to ecological, production method, and regulatory differences between the countries. Despite their dissimilarities, however, Brazil and the United States both largely fail to adequately protect farm animals and the environment from the impacts of large-scale animal …

Origins And Development Of Teaching Animal Law In Brazil, Tagore Trajano De Almeida Silva

Pace Environmental Law Review

This paper examines the strategies utilized on each continent and shows the path made for these scholars to build a framework to discuss animal law within law schools. The conclusion is that this movement produced by such scholars has changed the way law schools are teaching law and is affording new opportunities to solve animal concerns, and likewise, social problems in Brazil and around the world.

Therefore, this article first discusses the philosophical Brazilian background to teach animal law, and how the animal rights movement creates a framework for professors and students working in this field. It then summarily explores …

Using Emerging Pollution Tracking Methods To Address The Downstream Impacts Of Factory Farm Animal Welfare Abuse, Tarah Heinzen, Abel Russ

Pace Environmental Law Review

CAFOs present numerous interconnected ethical, environmental, and public health threats, and this article will discuss opportunities to address the multiple adverse impacts of factory farming through advances in pollution tracking methodologies. The first section will introduce the factory farm issue, and the relationship between its environmental and welfare consequences. We then review approaches to establishing liability for surface and groundwater contamination under existing pollution control laws and describe the unique challenges of using these approaches in the context of CAFO pollution. We then discuss techniques that have been used to more precisely identify sources of pollution, including measurements of a …

Cultural Solipsism, Cultural Lenses, Universal Principles, And Animal Advocacy, Thomas G. Kelch

Pace Environmental Law Review

Given the potpourri of human cultures and the need to take a global view of animal rights advocacy, how can animal rights advocates most efficiently and successfully advocate for animals? This article will address this issue.

First, I will describe and analyze views of the human/animal relationship from five example cultural traditions: Western culture, represented generally by Europe and North America, Indian culture, Chinese culture, South African culture, and Islamic culture, exemplified primarily here by Turkey. It is not asserted here that any of these cultures or countries are homogenous; they are not. Although Western culture is primarily constructed on …

Storm King Revisited: A View From The Mountaintop, Albert K. Butzel

Pace Environmental Law Review

This article and the underlying factual information were first presented at Pace University School of Law on April 15, 2010 as the Sixteenth Annual Lloyd K. Garrison Lecture on Environmental Law.

Mr. Butzel tells the story of the Storm King case, and gives his impression of where environmental litigation stands up today measured against the promise of the Storm King decision.

Maritime Emissions Taxation: An Alternative To The Eu Emissions Trading Scheme?, Jon M. Truby

Pace Environmental Law Review

Focusing on the EU’s alternative proposal of an emissions tax, this article analyzes the possibility for the imposition by an EU Member State of a targeted environmental tax to reduce maritime emissions. It considers how such a tax can be imposed in a manner that will not be detrimental to commercial interests and can instigate the desired impact. Importantly, it focuses upon providing a greater incentive for the maritime industry to invest in the most efficient shipping fleet to reduce emissions. It concludes by comparing whether such a perceived maritime emissions tax could be more advantageous than including maritime emissions …

Compensation For Environmental Damage In China: Theory And Practice, Michael G. Faure, Liu Jing

Pace Environmental Law Review

This article is organized as follows: following the introduction in Part I, Part II focuses on the role of liability rules in compensation for environmental harm, then Part III focuses on insurance, and Part IV discusses the specific case of marine oil pollution. For each topic, we will first describe theoretical possibilities for providing compensation, and then examine the role these mechanisms play in practice. Part V offers a few concluding remarks, and provides an economic analysis and policy recommendations.

Assessing Environmental Governance Of The Hudson River Valley: Application Of An Ippep Model, Wang Xi, Albert K. Butzel, Richard L. Ottinger, Nicholas A. Robinson, John Louis Parker, Taryn L. Rucinski, Marla E. Wieder, Radina R. Valova, Wang Pianpian

Pace Environmental Law Review

The process of obtaining effective implementation of environmental laws is a process of “environmental governance.” Law, including environmental law and other fields of law related to environmental law, is essential to frame, facilitate, and foster the major parties to correctly play their roles.

This thesis has been articulated through a Model of Interactions of Parties in the Process of Environmental Protection (IPPEP Model), which has been developed by Professor Wang Xi of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in the context of the People’s Republic of China. The IPPEP Model is a tool for observing and accessing environmental governance at work. It …

Response To New York’S Proposed Solar Renewable Energy Market: Lessons Learned From Other States’ Srec Markets And Recommendations In Moving Forward, Joe Naroditsky

Pace Environmental Law Review

Response to comment by Jesse Glickstein.

New York’S Proposed Solar Renewable Energy Market: Lessons Learned From Other States’ Srec Markets And Recommendations In Moving Forward, Jesse Glickstein

Pace Environmental Law Review

This paper presents analysis of eight states that currently have operating solar renewable energy credit markets as part of their state’s renewable portfolio system, in order to make recommendations as to how the New York legislature should amend the pending legislation based on lessons learned from those other states. In Part II, the different SREC markets that have been implemented in different states throughout the United States are examined. In Part III, the different issues that varying SREC markets have encountered will be discussed, and several possible explanations as to the causes of these issues are presented. In Part IV, …

The Chinese Legal Tradition As A Cultural Constraint On The Westernization Of Chinese Environmental Law And Policy: Toward A Chinese Environmental Law And Policy Regime With More Chinese Characteristics, Paul A. Barresi

Pace Environmental Law Review

This Article argues that the Chinese legal tradition is essentially a Confucian legal tradition, and that its Confucian attributes significantly constrain the effectiveness of the Western-style environmental laws enacted by the PRC in recent decades. Part I explores the emergence of a Confucian legal tradition in China and its impact on Chinese legal culture before the founding of the PRC. Part II highlights some of the impacts of this tradition on the Chinese legal system during the same period. Part III makes a case for the endurance of the Confucian essence of this legal tradition in the PRC itself, and …

A Mindful Environmental Jurisprudence?: Speculations On The Application Of Gandhi’S Thought To Mcwc V. Nestlé, Nehal A. Patel, Lauren Vella

Pace Environmental Law Review

We attempt to engage modern legal reasoning with Gandhi’s thought. We hope to speculate on what jurisprudence would look like if it were more mindful of the concepts central to Gandhi’s thought. By using Gandhi as an intellectual anchor, we hope to take a step toward creating a more “mindful jurisprudence” that implicitly incorporates into its reasoning the needs of environmental stewardship, disempowered populations, and the poverty-stricken. Because Gandhi’s thought has been discussed at length in environmental justice campaigns, we begin this effort by examining the relationship between environmental law and Gandhi’s thought. Given Gandhi’s commentaries on exploitative and oppressive …

The Liberal Limits Of Environmental Law: A Green Legal Critique, Michael M'Gonigle, Louise Takeda

Pace Environmental Law Review

The field of environmental law embodies a deep contradiction—it is a product of the state, yet the state is the primary agent of development. This contradiction infuses state-supported resource regimes (energy, forestry, agriculture, water use) that have long been agents of environmental erosion while they have remained resistant to progressive reform. It also underpins the theoretical framework for proposed reforms today, ecological modernization. The result is that environmental law extends, rather than resolves, society’s underlying environmental “problematic.” This can now be seen in institutional responses to climate change and the “green economy.” To address this situation, the authors apply a …

Only One Mekong: Developing Transboundary Eia Procedures Of Mekong River Basin, Jian Ke, Qi Gao

Pace Environmental Law Review

China shares borders with fourteen countries and has many international rivers. In most cases, China is an upstream state. Over the past years, increasing international disputes concerning international rivers have occurred between China and other riparian states, such as China’s dam construction on the upper Mekong River and the Songhua River pollution accident. In particular, with the ongoing dam construction on the upstream of Mekong in China, its potential environmental impact on the other Mekong countries is highly profiled. At the time of writing, five dams are already completed and two are in the final stage of construction or getting …

Problems For Pale Male: An Analysis Of The U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service’S Nest Destruction Policy, Brent Plater, Nicole Lopez-Hagan, Laura Horton

Pace Environmental Law Review

During the 2004 holiday season, Pale Male, New York City’s celebrated and world-renowned red-tailed hawk, had his nest deliberately destroyed. The nest was approximately 400-pounds and was built over several years. Almost immediately, this act of destruction was met with popular uproar among his many fans throughout the world. This tragic story could easily have been avoided if the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) had correctly carried out its duties under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). What happened to Pale Male years ago is still a possibility today because the Service’s policy remains the same. This article …

The Legal Profession’S Critical Role In Systems-Level Bioenergy Decision-Making, Jody M. Endres

Pace Environmental Law Review

Law as a discipline thus must seek greater prominence in the raging debates on the efficacy of modeling as a bioenergy policy driver. To ultimately determine law’s proper role, Part II of my article first assesses the universe of key economic and lifecycle models used in current bioenergy policy initiatives, as well as the models deployed in general environmental decision-making that could affect the siting and operation of biomass cropping and bioenergy facilities. Part III then dissects these models to uncover the multiple ways in which law can improve models both structurally and procedurally to achieve greater accuracy. The conclusion …

International Deployment Of Microbial Pest Control Agents: Falling Between The Cracks Of The Convention On Biological Diversity And The Cartagena Biosafety Protocol?, Guy R. Knudsen

Pace Environmental Law Review

This paper considers one tangled web of conflicting developments. It involves the popular desire to replace chemical pesticides with more “natural” biological control strategies, plus a slowly emerging awareness of a less benign side to microbial pest control agents, based on their potential invasiveness and sometimes striking similarities to agents of bioterrorism and biological warfare. This desire, however, is overshadowed by concerns about the environmental release of genetically engineered organisms. I argue that as some of the concerns about ecological diversity, as captured by the Convention on Biodiversity, were channeled into the subsequent Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention …

Carbon Tax With Reinvestment Trumps Cap-And-Trade, Stephen Sewalk

Pace Environmental Law Review

Part I of this paper reviews the current opinion surrounding carbon tax proposals as they appear in the literature. Part II will provide an overview of the current cap-and-trade proposals. Part III will introduce a carbon tax with reinvestment. Part IV of this article reviews the leading proposals arguing that a carbon tax is superior to cap-and-trade. And finally, for Part V explains why a carbon tax with reinvestment trumps cap-and-trade.

Environmental Law Confronts The New Industrial Revolution, Leslie Carothers

Pace Environmental Law Review

This issue of the Pace Environmental Law Review presents a set of articles to shed new light on those questions in the case of the products of nanotechnology. For comparison, the issue also includes an article on the regulation of genetically modified organisms in agriculture in the United States and Brazil, an early effort to govern the risks of a major new technology.

Unanswered Questions From The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review Of Compensated Cases Of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury, Mary Holland, Louis Conte, Robert Krakow, Lisa Colin

Pace Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

2010 Judges' Edition Memorandum, Hana C. Heineken

Pace Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

2010 Moot Court Problem, Jeffrey G. Miller, Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, Sean T. Dixon

Pace Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

An End To Grazing Lease Litigation: An Examination Of Alternative Dispute Resolution Schemes That Could Resolve The Overgrazing Dispute On State And Federally Owned Rangelands In The Western United States, Jamie Pool

Pace Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

2009 Judges' Edition Memorandum, Taryn L. Rucinski

Pace Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

2009 Moot Court Problem, Caroline Blanco, Sherry Hutt, Gary Nurkin, David Tarler, Ole Varmer

Pace Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

David Sive Award Best Brief Overall: Galleon Enterprises, Inc., Sarah Williams, Elizabeth Pletan, Matt Riley

Pace Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.