Digital Commons Network^™

"It's Not Easy Being Green": Local Initiatives, Preemption Problems, And The Market Participant Exception, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This Article considers whether the market participant exception should be interpreted to exempt local climate change and sustainability initiatives from the "ceilings" imposed by existing environmental laws and pending federal climate change legislation. In the decades-long absence of federal action on climate change, local governments – along with the states – positioned themselves at the forefront of climate change and sustainability planning. In fact, state and local actions account for most of the nation's greenhouse gas reduction efforts to date. Yet, front-running localities are being limited by a preemption doctrine that fails to account for both the motives behind their …

Confronting A Rising Tide: A Proposal For A Convention On Climate Change Refugees, Bonnie Docherty, Tyler Giannini

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This Article proposes a new legal instrument to confront the issue of climate change refugees. It defines climate change refugees as people whom climate change forces to relocate across national borders. The existing international legal framework – including its laws and its institutions – does not adequately address the emerging crisis. The proposed instrument should create obligations to deal with both prevention and remediation of the climate change refugee problem. First, the instrument should establish guarantees of human rights protections and humanitarian aid for a specific class of people. Second, it should spread the burden of fulfilling those guarantees across …

Seven Things The New Epa Administrator Should Do, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

In view of the dramatic shift in the nation's environmental policy that is presaged by the ascension of Barack Obama, I have been asked to suggest several actions that should be undertaken by the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This article was written on Jan. 26, 2009, six days after the inauguration. It is to appear in March. Thus every reader will know something that, today, I don't – what long-pent-up actions were taken by President Obama shortly after he moved into the Oval Office. But I am guessing that by the time this article appears, Lisa …

Comment On Developing A Comprehensive Approach To Climate Change Mitigation Policy In The United States: Integrating Levels Of Government And Economic Sectors, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The article by Thomas D. Peterson, Robert B. McKinstry Jr., and John C. Dernbach (PM&D) has two central insights: (1) Any serious national effort to control emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) must continue to leave important roles to the states; and (2) It would be a mistake to put too many eggs in the cap-and-trade basket. A portfolio approach that utilizes many different regulatory techniques is important.

I certainly agree with PM&D about these insights, and they are correct that much of the current Congressional debate has given too little attention to these considerations. However, I have serious reservations about …

Survey Of Seqra Cases From 2007, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The courts issued 58 decisions under the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) in 2007.

Typically, plaintiffs have a much greater chance of success in SEQRA cases when no environmental impact statement (EIS) has been prepared: on average, in the cases from 1990 (when this column’s annual survey began) through 2006, plaintiffs won 15.9 percent of the cases where there is an EIS, and 38.6 percent of the cases without an EIS.

But in 2007 the ratio was much different. In the 22 cases with an EIS, plaintiffs won seven, or 31.8 percent. In the 27 cases without …

Disparity Rules, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

In 1992, Congress required states receiving federal juvenile justice funds to reduce racial disparities in the confinement rates of minority juveniles. This provision, now known as the disproportionate minority contact standard (DMC), is potentially more far-reaching than traditional disparate impact standards: It requires the reduction of racial disparities regardless of whether those disparities were motivated by intentional discrimination orjustified by "legitimate" agency interests. Instead, the statute encourages states to address how their practices exacerbate racial disadvantage.

This Article casts the DMC standard as a partial response to the failure of constitutional and statutory standards to discourage actions that produce racial …

Private Property And The Politics Of Environmental Protection, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Private property plays two opposing roles in stories about the environment. In the story favored by most environmentalists, private property is the bad guy. It balkanizes an interconnected ecosystem into artificial units of individual ownership. Owners of these finite parcels have little incentive to invest in ecosystem resources and every incentive to dump polluting wastes onto other parcels. Only by relocating control over natural resources in some central authority like the federal government, can we make integrated decisions designed to preserve the health of the entire ecosystem. For these traditional environmentalists, private property is the problem; public control is the …

Bi-Polar And Polycentric Approaches To Human Rights And The Environment, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Within the well-established human rights system, there exist at least three ways to promote environmental ends (each of which is discussed further in Section III below): (1) mobilizing existing rights to achieve environmental ends; (2) reinterpreting existing rights to include environmental concerns; and (3) creating new rights, such as the right to a clean environment. To justify engaging in any one of these processes, an advocate must recognize both their moral legitimacy and legal utility. As one author has argued, "the justification for rights is to be found in the way in which they enable us to address a key …

Private Lawyers And Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

A private lawyer representing a private client is seldom a crusader. When environmental justice is relevant to a particular matter – the client proposes to build a facility and engages the lawyer to help secure necessary governmental approvals, for example-the lawyer's primary duty must be to the client.

The client in such a case faces two primary types of questions: substantive, such as where and how to build the facility; and procedural, deciding what processes to follow and how much to involve the community in the planning. Typically, by the time the lawyer is brought in, the client already has …

Harnessing Information Technology To Improve The Environmental Impact Review Process, Michael B. Gerrard, Michael Herz

Faculty Scholarship

In 1970, when the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was enacted, the new and exciting information management technologies were the handheld four-function calculator and the eight-track tape cassette. Three decades later, after the personal computer, the digital revolution, and the World Wide Web, the implementation of NEPA is still stuck in the world of 1970. Other aspects of the bureaucracy have seen reform-the E-Government Strategy, an E-Government Act, the creation of a new Office of Electronic Government within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and, to focus on the environmental arena, the breathtaking success of the web-based Toxic Release …

Racial Justice: Moral Or Political?, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly one hundred years ago, W.E.B. DuBois predicted that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line. Were he writing today, DuBois might well conclude that in the U.S., the problem of the coming century will be the problem of the color-bind. Although Americans arguably remain "the most 'race-conscious' people on earth," our national conversation about "race" now stands at an impasse. Our ways of talking, or refusing to talk, about race increasingly speak past the racialized dilemmas of educational equity, affirmative action, poverty, welfare reform, housing, lending, labor and employment discrimination, health …

The Community Economic Development Movement, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Within a five-minute walk of the Stony Brook subway stop in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, you can encounter the following:

• A renovated industrial site of about five acres and sixteen buildings that serves as a business incubator for small firms that receive technical assistance from the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation (JPNDC), a nonprofit community development corporation, which is also housed there. Known as the Brewery after its former proprietor, a beer-maker, the complex is owned by a nonprofit subsidiary of JPNDC.
• A 44,000-foot "Stop & Shop" supermarket. The market opened in 1991 after years in which the …

Judicial Review Under Seqra: A Statistical Study, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly 2000 judicial opinions were issued under the State Environmental Quality Review Act ("SEQRA") between its enactment in 1975 and the end of 2000. Almost 700 were issued from 1990 (when the author began undertaking an annual review of SEQRA cases for the New York Law Journal) through 2000. These numbers are large enough to serve as a basis for a statistically valid review of case outcomes.

This article is divided into five parts. Part I presents statistics on the SEQRA cases. Part II reviews the history of how the Court of Appeals has decided SEQRA cases. Part III …

Reflections On Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental justice is a very hot topic. Yesterday's New York Times on the front page of the Metropolitan section had a story stating: Mid-Sized Plants Headed to Poor Areas. The story stated, "The Pataki administration acknowledges in its own study that the electric generators that it wants to install around New York City would go into poor heavily minority communities, a finding that supports some of the arguments of the project's opponents. This is quoting an unreleased environmental justice analysis that may or may not be valid, but it certainly shows how hot a topic it is. This morning …

Consultants' And Lawyers' Duties To Report Contamination, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

A recent decision by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) expands the duty of environmental consultants to report contamination on their clients' land. The rationale of the decision might also apply to lawyers and to states beyond New York.

Many federal, state and municipal laws require spills of pollutants to be reported to the government. People have received criminal penalties, including jail time, as well as heavy civil fines, for violating some of these requirements. Almost all of these rules apply only to persons who own, operate, or are otherwise in charge of the polluting facility, or …

Trends In The Supply And Demand For Environmental Lawyers, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The boom times for environmental lawyers were the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The June 1990 issue of Money magazine called environmental law a "fast-track career." Two or three years of experience with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a state environmental agency, the environmental units of the Justice Department, or a state attorney general's office were a ticket to a high-paying job in the private sector. Law students were clamoring to enter the field and law firms were scrambling to find experienced environmental lawyers, or to recycle newly underemployed antitrust lawyers into this burgeoning field.

Environmental Justice And Natural Areas Protection Trends & Insight, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

There are 3,119,963 square miles in the continental United States. That sounds like plenty of space to put just about anything. However, when the facility seeking a home is environmentally controversial, finding even one square mile can seem almost impossible.

This country is now in its third major era in making siting decisions. The first era – unconstrained siting – lasted until the late 1960s. Then began the second era – protecting natural areas. In the early 1990s, we embarked upon a third era – environmental justice. The growing tensions between protecting natural areas and achieving environmental justice suggest that …

Ecology And The Jewish Spirit: Where Nature And The Sacred Meet, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

It's a real shame, but all political and social movements, at some point, break up into factions. The factions debate their relative necessity, claim authority over areas of discourse and action, and generally vie for power. They stop coordinating and communicating with each other. There are occasional acts of sabotage. The competition of the market economy (including the grant-funded non-profit sector) and the expanse of human vanity demand this distinction. Everyone needs to find their niche. An ecologist understands this as well as an economist, an activist as well as a lobbyist, a rabbi as well as a lawyer.

The Past, Present And Future Of Title Vi Of The Civil Rights Act As A Tool Of Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard, Nicholas Johnson, Peggy Shepard, Melva J. Hayden, Sheila Foster, Elizabeth Georges

Faculty Scholarship

Mr. Michael Gerrard: I am going to try to do something a little unconventional. After hearing some remarks from Professor Johnson, I will try to start a dialogue. I have been requested to ask very tough questions of our panelists, so I will do that in the hope of drawing all of you in the audience into the dialogue. First, we will hear some remarks from Professor Nicholas Johnson of Fordham University School of Law.

Demons And Angels In Hazardous Waste Regulation: Are Justice, Efficiency, And Democracy Reconcilable?, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The Superfund program is perhaps environmental law's best Rorschach test, in which those who write about the national effort to clean up contaminated sites disclose as much about their own philosophies of justice, democracy, and economic efficiency as about environmental legislation. The ten books reviewed here show deep conflicts among these values. I argue, based on these disparate judgments, that many of the Superfund debates have an almost religious character. The law has been shaped to fit the view that demonic polluters were, and remain, at work. The law also reflects a sense of higher duty to future generations – …

Comparative Risk Assessment In New York, Michael B. Gerrard, Deborah Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Comparative risk assessment (CRA) is the examination of the relative risks posed by different dangers, with a view to deciding which dangers deserve the most governmental attention. CRA frequently tries to reduce different problems to a common metric, usually the statistical lives saved by a program, so that apples can be weighed against oranges. This article will discuss and assess the growing use of CRA in New York State.

There are two principal arguments for the use of CRA in the environmental context. The first is that we do not have unlimited resources; we cannot move against all problems simultaneously. …

The Victims Of Nimby, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

It is a syndrome, a pejorative, and an acronym of our times: NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard. It has a political arm, NIMTOO (Not In My Term Of Office), an object of attack, LULUs (Locally Undesired Land Uses), and an extreme form, BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone). Acronyms aside, however, the question remains as to whether or not NIMBY has victims. Is anyone hurt by NIMBY?

Many leading voices in the environmental justice movement believe that minority communities are victims of NIMBY. For example, Professor Robert D. Bullard has written that "[t]he cumulative effect of not-in-my-backyard …

The Role Of Existing Environmental Laws In The Environmental Justice Movement, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

I will focus on what can and cannot be done under the existing statutory and regulatory structures and the common law to protect minority communities from environmental hazards. I will highlight some of the current holes in the legal system to suggest areas where statutory reform might be useful. Fights against these facilities break down between future unbuilt facilities, on the one hand, and existing facilities on the other hand.

A broad array of statutes regulates future facilities, such as landfills, incinerators, interstate highways, and polluting factories. Some of these laws are aimed at providing information and requiring the decision …