Digital Commons Network^™

Lng Facility Siting And Environmental (In)Justice: Is It Time For A National Siting Scheme?, Eileen Gauna

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the distributional and other environmental justice issues arising from the current initiative to rapidly site multiple LNG import facilities in order to increase the supply of natural gas into the continental United States. This Article further examines the necessity of creating a national siting scheme to avoid exacerbating existing racial disparities in risk-producing land use practices.

The Politics Of Risk: Pre-Litigation Site Assessment In Houston, Texas, Gregg P. Macey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Integrative Lawyering: Navigating The Political Economy Of Urban Redevelopment Symposium: Race, Economic Justice, And Community Lawyering In The New Century, Sheila R. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

This shift from defending and reacting to creating and envisioning requires a more engaged organizational role for the lawyer. The lawyer is now expected to do more than translate the organization/community's grievance into discreet legal frameworks and discourse---e.g., a civil rights violation, a nuisance, participatory right, etc. The lawyer now intervenes in negotiations from which the organization or community has been excluded. This new role requires a shifting, flexible mix of skills and a more dynamic interaction with the organization and its varied functions-policy, community education, lobbying, and organizing. This new role is what we call "integrative lawyering," an emergent …

The Lawyer Is Not The Protagonist: Community Campaigns, Law, And Social Change, The Symposium: Race, Economic Justice, And Community Lawyering In The New Century: Concluding Essay, Jennifer Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Stories about law and social change can have a sameness to them. Yet in many ways, the tales told in this volume stand out from the crowd. Each story is shaped around a campaign undertaken by a community organization or coalition deeply engaged in the struggle for racial and economic justice. Attorneys appear as supporting players rather than main characters, seeking to help organizations build the power needed to achieve their goals. These lawyers translate information about the law into lay language, pressure opponents, defend the organization, open up spaces for community voice and action, and seek to establish new …

Will Superfund Rise Again?, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

The federal hazardous waste cleanup program and its state progency have been in decline for more than a decade, victims to a campaign of sabotage waged by industry and neglected by the Bush administration. Meanwhile, stakeholders do their best to ignore the program's sorry state. A sad story, but there may be a surprise ending in store.

To Attain “The Just Rewards Of So Much Struggle”: Local-Resident Equity Participation In Urban Revitalization, Barbara L. Bezdek

Faculty Scholarship

Annually, Americans pour out their sympathy for people displaced from their communities by natural disasters such as fires, floods, and hurricanes. We respond, knowing the anchor that the concept of “home” supplies to body, soul, and family; we intuit the toll exacted by the loss of familiar walls, private homes and community-shared places. Yet, redevelopment policy and practice in the U.S. today relies upon the massive relocation of poor people and the destruction of poor people’s neighborhoods with only token recognition of the costs and burdens imposed on the displaced. Although the devastation of community, family, and lives is just …

Locational Justice: Race, Class, And The Grassroots Protest Of Property Takings, Judith E. Koons

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Creating A Tribal Law Practice Clinic In Kansas: Carving The Peg To Fit The Hole, Aliza Organick

Faculty Scholarship

This article will focus on three main challenges in creating a tribal court practice clinic. The first part will address creating a tribal court focus within an existing clinic curriculum. The second part will address the process of designing a curriculum for the TCPC that includes incorporating the basic doctrinal foundations of federal Indian law, as well as the clinical skills necessary to practice in a tribal court setting. The third part will offer some concluding thoughts on my long-term plans and dreams for TCPC.

The Ecological Life: Discovering Citizenship And A Sense Of Humanity, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

Written as a series of lectures, The Ecological Life offers a humanistic perspective on environmental philosophy that challenges some of the dogmas of deep ecology and radical environmentalism while speaking for their best desires. The book argues that being human-centered leaves us open to ecological identifications, rather than the opposite. Bendik-Keymer draws on analytic and continental traditions of philosophy as well as literature and visual media. He argues for a sense of ecological justice consonant with human rights, and shows how humanistic thinking is committed to deepening respect for life and our ecological orientation. In a clear, jargon-free and conversational …

City As An Ecological Space: Social Capital And Urban Land Use, The , Sheila R. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

One of the goals of land use (and pollution control) law is to force the internalization of these costs. This otherwise economic view of land use law is also rooted, however, in an ecological understanding of urban land use. Legal scholars writing over three decades ago successfully argued, based upon the ecological facts of life, that "[p]roperty does not exist in isolation" because the effects of its uses flow outside of the boundaries of ownership. The notion that property is inextricably part of a network of social and economic relationships, and that its impacts traverse legally defined boundaries and relationships, …

An Unnatural Disaster: The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, David M. Driesen, Alyson Flournoy, Sheila Foster, Eileen Gauna, Robert L. Glicksman, Carmen G. Gonzalez, David J. Gottlieb, Donald T. Hornstein, Douglas A. Kysar, Thomas O. Mcgarity, Catherine A. O'Neill, Clifford Rechtschaffen, Christopher Schroeder, Sidney Shapiro, Rena I. Steinzor, Joseph P. Tomain, Robert R.M. Verchick, Karen Sokol

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, An Unnatural Disaster, Eileen Gauna

Faculty Scholarship

This report analyzes key policy decisions, as well as actions and inaction under health, safety, and environmental laws, that could have better protected New Orleans from the effects of Katrina before the hurricane and those that could have improved the emergency response in its wake. In the area of public health, safety, and the environment, the paper explores the implementation of wetlands law and policy, bad decisions regarding the construction and maintenance of the levee system designed to protect New Orleans, pollution prevention and clean-up laws, and energy policy. In the area of emergency response, it reviews policy decisions related …

Environmental Justice, Eileen Gauna, Catherine A. O'Neill, Clifford Rechtschaffen

Faculty Scholarship

This white paper describes briefly the remarkable journey of community-based environmental justice advocates over the last 15 years and their impact on environmental regulation. It will also describe some of the empirical evidence of disparities and the regulatory dynamics that make these inequities an intractable problem, despite the collective efforts of grassroots leaders, environmental justice organizations, public interest law firms, and governmental officials. The paper then focuses on one important set of issues that must be tackled in order to achieve environmental justice: those involving injustice in risk regulation. We strive in this white paper, as allies in this collective …

The (Non)Uniqueness Of Environmental Law, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

In everyday discourse, the label "environmental law" signifies a distinct and unique area of the law. The uniqueness of environmental law stems most obviously from the subject matter of environmental legislation and regulation. But does environmental law also differ from other areas of law with respect to how judges ought to approach deciding cases? Should judges act differently somehow when they are deciding an environmental law case as opposed to, for example, a labor law or banking law case? At least one influential scholar - Richard Lazarus of the Georgetown University Law Center - has argued that the distinctive features …

A Perfect Storm: Mercury And The Bush Administration, Part Ii, Rena I. Steinzor, Lisa Heinzerling

Faculty Scholarship

The Environmental Protection Agency's recent proposal to regulate mercury emissions from power plants, and its final rule on mercury emissions from chlor-alkali facilities, suffer from serious scientific, legal, economic, and distributional flaws. The first installment in this series examined the strong scientific basis for regulating mercury emissions and critiqued the agency's decisions from a legal perspective. This second (and final) installment finds that EPA's decisions also fail from the perspectives of economics and environmental justice. EPA and the Office of Management and Budget's economic analysis of the proposal to regulate mercury from power plants was shoddy and one-sided. EPA and …

Mining In Irian Jaya: How Citizens Should Think About Environmental Justice, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

"All around me are the facts of my life. But I can't see them, because the way I think gets in the way." I am making a case for environmental justice. We'll explore how questioning our lives and actions helps us grasp environmental justice. I believe environmental justice calls many of us to conceive of our lives in new ways so that we can become true ecological citizens. First, relations between humans and lands need to be articulated, and we need to think of our lives in spatially, temporally and ecologically extended ways. This paper is intended initially as an …

A Perfect Storm: Mercury And The Bush Administration, Rena I. Steinzor, Lisa Heinzerling

Faculty Scholarship

In December 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a rule for mercury emissions from power plants and issued a final rule for mercury emissions from chlor-alkali facilities. Regarding power plants, EPA had previously found that mercury posed the most serious threat among the hazardous air pollutants emitted by power plants, and also that regulation of mercury from power plants was appropriate and necessary under section 112 of the Clean Air Act, which requires stringent technology-based regulation for hazardous air pollutants. Despite section 112's clear rejection of emissions trading as a compliance option, EPA has proposed to allow commercial trading …

Citizen Suits And Sustainability, John C. Dernbach

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Environmental Legal Professionalism Adapted To Citizen Suit Processes, Brion Blackwelder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hormesis, Hotspots And Emissions Trading, Jonathan B. Wiener

Faculty Scholarship

Instrument choice -- the comparison of technology standards, performance standards, taxes and tradable permits -- has been a major topic in environmental law and environmental economics. Most analyses assume that emissions and health effects are positively and linearly related. If they are not, this complicates the instrument choice analysis. This article analyses the effects of a nonlinear dose/response function on instrument choice. In particular, it examines the effects of hormesis (highdose harm but low-dose benefit) on the choice between fixed performance standards and tradable emissions permits. First, the article distinguishes the effects of hormesis from the effects of local emissions. …

Challenge Of Environmental Justice, The, Sheila R. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

The residents of Camden, New Jersey do not live in a bustling city as do residents living across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Instead, Camden's largely minority population lives in an environmentally and economically devastated neighborhood replete with two Superfund sites. Garbage incinerators, sewage treatment plants and polluting factories have been placed in Camden because the poor have historically been less likely to protest than wealthier communities. In 1997, concerned Camden residents formed the South Camden Citizens in Action ( SCCA ) association to confront the continued encroachment by polluting factories and sewage treatment centers threatening their lives and …

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 …

Environmental Justice: Stakes, Stakeholders, Strategies, Eileen Gauna, Shiela Foster

Faculty Scholarship

A quick review of the beginning prominence of and continued work for environmental justice.

Are County Officials Liable For Forcibly Executing A Search Warrant Against A Sovereign Indian Tribe, John P. Lavelle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

How Does Your Positionality Bias Your Epistemology?, David Takacs

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …

Risk, Death And Harm: The Normative Foundations Of Risk Regulation, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Is death a harm? Is the risk of death a harm? These questions lie at the foundations of risk regulation. Agencies that regulate threats to human life, such as the EPA, OSHA, the FDA, the CPSC, or NHTSA, invariably assume that premature death is a first-party harm - a welfare setback to the person who dies - and often assume that being at risk of death is a distinct and additional first-party harm. If these assumptions are untrue, the myriad statutes and regulations that govern risky activities should be radically overhauled, since the third-party benefits of preventing premature death and …

Why Lawyers Should Care, John C. Dernbach

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Searching For A Sense Of Control: The Challenge Presented By Community Conflicts Over Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, Nancy A. Welsh, Barbara Gray

Faculty Scholarship

The growth in the number of concentrated animal feeding operations ("CAFOs"), particularly those involved in swine production, has brought with it increased community concern and outright conflict in many communities across the United States.' Most commentators have focused upon anticipated outcomes to explain the contentiousness of CAFO-related disputes.2 Meanwhile, even though the social dynamics that contribute to the development and escalation of conflicts over CAFOs parallel those exhibited in other kinds of community conflicts, little research has systematically examined the social dynamics associated with CAFO conflicts. One exception to this deficiency is recent work conducted by a team of researchers …