Transportation Law Commons^™

One Centimeter Over My Back Yard: Where Does Federal Preemption Of State Drone Regulation Start? (With Albert J. Plawinski", Henry H. Perritt Jr.

Henry H. Perritt, Jr.

One Centimeter Over My Back Yard: Where Does Federal Preemption Of State Drone Regulation Start?, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

The proliferation of cheap civilian drones and their obvious utility for precision agriculture, motion picture and television production, aerial surveying, newsgathering, utility infrastructure inspection, and disaster relief has accelerated the FAA’s sluggish effort to develop a proposal for generally applicable rules and caused it to grant more than 600 “section 333 exemptions” permitting commercial drone flight before its rules are finalized.

Federal preemption in the field of aviation safety regulation is generally assumed, but political pressure on states and municipalities to regulate drones and the ability of this revolutionary aviation technology to open up space close to the ground for …

Locomotives V. Local Motives: The Coming Conflict, Statutory Void, And Legal Uncertainties Riding With Reactivated Rails-To-Trails White River Environmental Law Writing Competition Winner, Matthew J. Mcgowan

Student Scholarship

Study after study projects that the United States economy will come to rely more and more on freight rail in the twenty-first century. Few would have predicted the industry's reemergence 30 years ago when Congress, alarmed at the mass exodus from railroad and the resulting anemic rail infrastructure due to abandonment, began passing laws that culminated in 1983 with a rail-banking amendment to the National Trail System Act of 1976. The new statute streamlined the transfer of these rail corridors to private groups for safekeeping in the event railroads once again needed to reactivate the corridors. Since then, parks departments, …

Definitions, Religion, And Free Exercise Guarantees, Mark Strasser

Mark Strasser

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the free exercise of religion. Non-religious practices do not receive those same protections, which makes the ability to distinguish between religious and non-religious practices important. Regrettably, members of the Court have been unable to agree about how to distinguish the religious from the non-religious—sometimes, the implicit criteria focus on the sincerity of the beliefs, sometimes the strength of the beliefs or the role that they play in an individual’s life, and sometimes the kind of beliefs. In short, the Court has virtually guaranteed an incoherent jurisprudence by sending contradictory signals with …