Law Commons^™

Regulating For The Public Health: Perchlorate Regulation Under The Safe Drinking Water Act Exceeds Statutory Authority, Mary Jones

Mary Jones

This paper recommends rethinking the statutory framework of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to provide a more robust rubric, to include a scientific and objective focus, for proper regulation. The SDWA is evaluated through the lens of upcoming perchlorate regulation due in February 2013.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates acceptable contaminant levels and decontamination processes for all public water systems, pursuant to statutory authority granted by the SDWA. Where the policy at work is admirable, the execution falls short.

Perchlorate occurs naturally, but also as a by-product to rocket fuel, firework, and other explosive constructions. Scientific …

A Negative Externality By Any Other Name: Using Emissions Caps As Models For Constraining Dead-Weight Costs Of Regulation, Scott A. Shepard

Scott A. Shepard

Emissions caps work on a simple and compelling premise. Regulated entities, in the process of creating something desirable, like energy, create and expel some problematic by-product, such as carbon. They do this because they particularly reap a significant set of benefits (e.g., profits, market share, job security) from their efforts, while only diffusely and incidentally, along with the rest of society, suffering the harms caused by their emissions. These emissions, paid for primarily by the rest of society, are called negative externalities. Emissions-cap regimes are designed to make regulated entities more directly accountable for the costs of their emissions and …

Conserving A Place For Renewable Power, Jacob P. Byl

Jacob P. Byl

Promoting renewable power and conserving land are often conflicting goals because renewable power requires a lot of land. The conflict is becoming an important issue on lands encumbered by conservation easements. I argue that the current legal rule allowing oil and gas development, but not wind and solar development, on conserved land does not make sense in light of the threats of climate change. The best way to encourage renewable power while respecting the intent of landowners is to have the Internal Revenue Service promulgate rules that explicitly allow renewable power going forward and interpret existing easements with a set …

Regulatory Takings: Survey Of A Constitutional Culture, James Valvo

James Valvo

Fifth Amendment property protections under the Takings Clause have grown increasingly contentious as governing entities have used regulations to limit what property owners can do with their land. This paper profiles regulatory takings jurisprudence from Pennsylvania Coal, to Penn Central, to Nollan and Dolan, and Tahoe-Sierra. The paper also examines conceptual constructs that have shaped the field’s evolution, including: the doctrine’s origin, the nuisance exception, the changed circumstances argument, unconstitutional conditions, temporary takings and the denominator problem.