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Brownfields At 20: A Critical Reevaluation, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

Following a basic description of the New Jersey program, I will discuss two specific developments, the BDA initiative and the recent "Grace Period Rule," that changed some aspects of the program. My aim is more modest than a full-scale re-evaluation of all brownfields programs (or indeed of the New Jersey program in its totality); instead I look at the experience within one program to assess whether there is movement toward the development-centered approach. I find that some developments in New Jersey are positive, notably the BDA's approach to addressing multiple brownfield sites concurrently in the same location. On the other …

Richmond Law Magazine: Winter 2007

Richmond Law Magazine

Features:

Creative Balance: Intellectual Property and Free Expression

Hanging a Shingle in Cairo: Practice Among the Pyramids Brings Rewards, Challenges

From the Streets to a GED: Law Students Volunteer for Offender GED Program

Building Healthy Cities: Legal Frameworks And Considerations, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

This chapter will explore the range of laws and government policies that have shaped the physical structure of U.S. cities and thereby impacted the health of those cities' residents. This analysis will highlight the many, apparently "private" decisions that have been impacted by government policies. Though some of the laws, policies, prohibitions, and incentives have been formulated explicitly to take into account health considerations, others have unintended effects - both good and bad - on the health of urban populations.

Creation, Liberation, And Property: Virtues And Values Toward A Theocentric Earth Ethic, W. Wade Berryhill

Law Faculty Publications

Religion continues to play a significant role in shaping our attitudes toward nature.2 Time-honored principles of stewardship of the land demand that we owe a duty to future generations to allow them to inherit a healthy environment. Essential to this obligation is spiritual faith, not the trendy brand of secular humanism espoused by ecodogmatists seeking environmental justice through means unmoored from centuries-old principles of creation. What secular humanism ignores-and what religious traditions the world over have recognizedis the reality that we are a "creative expression of the earth's own evolution."3 Thus, in light of our duty to posterity, mere emphasis …

The Built Environment And Its Relationship To The Public's Health: The Legal Framework, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

Public health advocates can help shape the design of cities and suburbs in ways that improve public health, but to do so effectively they need to understand the legal framework. This article re- views the connection between public health and the built environment and then describes the legal pathways for improving the design of our built environment.

Brownfields Redevelopment, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

Critiquing how brownfields programs expanded without much attention to developments in the international environmental arena will illustrate some ways to alter them to comport with Agenda 21 and other prerequisites for sustainable development. Another interesting aspect of this analysis for the Rio+ 10 review is its timing. The state and federal programs have mushroomed since 1992; for example, while a small of states had "voluntary cleanup programs" 10 years ago, virtually every state has one now, and there is considerable increasing experience with them. If adjustments to these programs should be developed to comport with the prescriptions of Agenda 21 …

Earning Deference: Reflections On The Merger Of Environmental And Land-Use Law, Michael Allan Wolf

Law Faculty Publications

The bedrock notion that courts should, in the overwhelming majority of cases, defer to lawmakers is currently under attack in the nation's courts, commentary and classrooms. Leading the way are several United States Supreme Court Justices who, in cases involving the Commerce Clause, the Takings Clause and Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment, are much more willing than their immediate predecessors to second-guess the motives and tactics of elected and appointed officials at all levels of government. ...

A Case Study Of Sustainable Development: Brownfields, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

Critiquing how brownfields programs expanded without much attention to developments in the international environmental arena will illustrate some ways to alter them to comport with Agenda 21 and other prerequisites for sustainable development. Another interesting aspect of this analysis for the Rio + 10 review is its timing. The state and federal programs have mushroomed since 1992; for example, while a small minority of states had "voluntary cleanup programs" 10 years ago, virtually every state has one now, and there is considerable and increasing experience with them. If adjustments to these programs should be developed to comport with the prescriptions …

Environmental Law Slogans For The New Millenium, Michael Allan Wolf

University of Richmond Law Review

Contrary to the bleakest predictions offered by environmental fatalists during the latter half of the 1900s, humanity and much of the plant and animal kingdom survived New Year's Eve 1999. Similarly, contrary to the dire warnings of industrial organizations and lobbyists that overburdening environmental regulations would spell the end of profitable, American capitalism, the year 2000 dawned in the United States with the world's most extensive array of anti-pollution and pro-conservation measures regulating the globe's most impressive economic engines.

Adr At The Environmental Protection Agency, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

This chapter examines how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods to help resolve complex environmental disputes. In recent years, the EPA's use of ADR has increased dramatically in a wide variety of settings. The EPA has made ADR a central feature of its environmental enforcement strategy, encouraged its use in Title VI and environmental justice conflict settings, and turned to negotiated rulemaking as an alternative to the cumbersome notice-and-comment process for development of new federal regulations. Other EPA programs, such as the Brownfields Economic Redevelopment Initiative, promote nonadversarial methods for tackling complex environmental problems. …

The Manipulation Of Indigenous Status: The Federal Government As Shape-Shifter, David E. Wilkins

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

"The federal-Indian relationship is like no other in the world. Indian tribes are denominated 'domestic-dependent nations' but their practical relationship with the United States 'resembles that of a ward to his guardian.' Indian tribes appear to have the same political status as the independent states of San Marino, Monaco, and Liechtenstein, yet they have little real self-government and seem to be forever mired in a state of political and economic pupilage."

This fifteen-year-old statement from Vine Deloria, Jr., the preeminent Indian political and legal scholar, still accurately reflects the convoluted nature of indigenous political, legal, and economic statuses in the …

Alternative Dispute Resolution At The Environmental Protection Agency, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

This chapter examines how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods to help resolve complex environmental disputes. In recent years, the EPA's use of ADR has increased dramatically in a wide variety of settings. The EPA has made ADR a central feature of its environmental enforcement strategy, encouraged its use in Title VI and environmental justice conflict settings, and turned to negotiated rulemaking as an alternative to the cumbersome notice-and-comment process for the development of new federal regulations. Other EPA programs, such as the Brownfields Economic Redevelopment Initiative, promote nonadversarial methods for tackling complex environmental …

Richmond Law Magazine: Fall 1999

Richmond Law Magazine

Features:

Greater Heights

Attracting Top Faculty

Drawing Stellar Students

Sharpening Career Focus

Brownfields Policies For Sustainable Cities, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

My analysis begins in Part I with a short summary of brownfields law and policy, and a description of our current understanding of "sustainable development." There is no hard and fast definition of the term, but it is increasingly more clear that a body of sustainable development "law" will take shape as the product of a host of decisions made now and in the near future. The optimal way to ensure that brownfields programs mesh with this body of law-whatever it turns out to be-is to incorporate basic norms of sustainable development about which there is widespread agreement. Those agreed-upon …

Richmond Law Magazine: Winter 1999

Richmond Law Magazine

Feature:

Preparing for a Wired World

Dangerous Crossing: State Brownfields Recycling And Federal Enterprise Zoning, Michael Allan Wolf

Law Faculty Publications

Urban policymakers over the past two decades have engineered a curious and potentially dangerous intersection of late 20th Century policies designed to foster the rebirth of America's distressed urban regions. First, we find widespread enthusiasm about the potential for reusing brownfields 1 (typically contaminated urban sites), which has stimulated an impressive range of initiatives at all levels of government. 2 Second, after more than a decade of sitting on the sidelines and watching the states battle over the ideal range of incentives that will most effectively drive inner-city redevelopment, the federal government finally entered the fray in the 1990s with …

Annual Survey Of Virginia Law: Environmental Law, Kelley A. Kinney, Andrea West Wortzel

University of Richmond Law Review

This article reviews the key environmental developments at the federal and state levels during the period from June 1996 to June 1998. Legislation and judicial decisions are presented topically. Certain issues, such as public participation and environmental justice, are playing an increasing role and will likely impact all media.

"Brownfields Of Dreams?": Challenges And Limits Of Voluntary Cleanup Programs And Incentives, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

As one of the most important current topics in environmental law, the redevelopment of abandoned or underutilized urban properties, better known as brownfields, continues to generate much discussion and debate. Because most agree that abandoned sites located in aging areas and the accompanying exodus of industry to the suburbs are undesirable, the federal government and many state governments have created programs to encourage the redevelopment of these industrial properties. But often overlooked by the advocates of such programs are the difficult political, scientific, and moral questions associated with redevelopment. In this insightful article, Professor Eisen provides the most comprehensive discussion …

Suburbs Under Siege: Race, Space And Audacious Judges, Abigail T. Baker

University of Richmond Law Review

Across the United States, cities are witnessing a mass exodus into the suburbs with increasing frequency. The prestige that once attached to urbanites is now equated with these "new suburbanites." Claiming better schools, safer neighborhoods and overall peace of mind, the new suburbanites have been the pied-piper to thousands of other city dwellers. By and large, those that have been able to afford to move out of the cities are white, middle-class Americans.6 Local exclusionary zoning, by permitting only certain types of homes to be built in a specific area, has rendered the American dream-owning a home in suburbia-unattainable for …

The Twilight Of Land-Use Controls: A Paradigm Shift?, Charles M. Haar

University of Richmond Law Review

The subject chosen for this discussion is both timely and thought-provoking: the status and future of land-use regulations in the United States. In the hope of making the issues subsumed under this title as exciting to the general public as they are to the practitioners, Professor Michael Allan Wolf has taken the monumental Euclid decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1926 as the pivot of our deliberations. He has posed the question most dramatically with overtones of a swelling Wagnerian overture: "Is It The Twilight of Environmental and Land-Use Regulation?"

The Mescalero Apache Indians And Monitored Retrievable Storage Of Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Study In Environmental Ethics, Noah M. Sachs

Law Faculty Publications

The proposal of the Mescalero Apache Indians of New Mexico to host a nuclear waste storage facility raised difficult questions about political sovereignty, environmental justice, and democratic consent. While the proposal had numerous drawbacks and deserved to be opposed, many of the arguments used against it were conceptually flawed and paternalistic. Arguments decrying bribery of a poor community were particularly weak, while those criticizing targeting of Indian tribes by the United States government and coercion of tribal members by the Mescalero leadership had more merit. The core ethical arguments should be separated from the rhetoric so that policy makers, Native …

Toward A Sustainable Urbanism: Lessons From Federal Regulation Of Urban Stormwater Runoff, Joel B. Eisen

Law Faculty Publications

This Article focuses on the particularly vexing challenge of forging a sustainable urbanism in Edge Cities and analyzes regulatory attempts to control urban stormwater runoff. If our task is to "describe the natural world and to evaluate our actions toward it in ways that presuppose ... [a] community between nature and mankind," we must also characterize and address this source of considerable pollution, which originates from thousands of dispersed locations. Unfortunately, environmental protection efforts have only begun to address the pollution of urban stormwater runoffs. Parts II and III of this Article detail these largely unsuccessful attempts and conclude that …