Law Commons^™

Leave Film Tax Credits On Cutting-Room Floor, Sheldon H. Laskin

Sheldon H. Laskin

No abstract provided.

The Fire Next Time: Land Use Planning In The Wildland/Urban Interface, Jamison E. Colburn

Jamison E. Colburn

Wildfire is a growing threat to suburban and exurban communities, in part because fires have grown more severe and frequent as a result of land use and climatic influences and in part because more people are living in fire prone areas. The so-called Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA), the federal government’s response to this crisis, is a deeply flawed statute that will likely exacerbate wildfire risks at the same time it makes real ecological restoration even harder. While HFRA took halting, partial steps toward the integration of broad and small scale land use planning, it was clearly still the outgrowth …

Climate Change And Freshwater Resources, Noah D. Hall, Bret B. Stuntz, Robert H. Abrams

Noah D Hall

The Earth’s climate is warming. This is the unequivocal conclusion of climate scientists. Despite the complexities of climatology, certain consistent trends emerge with implications for water availability: as the world gets warmer, it will experience increased regional variability in precipitation, with more frequent heavy precipitation events and more susceptibility to drought. These simple facts will have a profound impact on freshwater resources throughout the United States, as the warmer climate will reduce available water supplies and increase water demand. Unfortunately, current water law and policy are not up to the new challenges of climate change and resulting pressures on freshwater …

Climate Change And Carbon Sequestration: Assessing A Liability Regime For Long-Term Storage Of Carbon Dioxide, Alexandra B. Klass, Elizabeth J. Wilson

Alexandra B. Klass

As the nation struggles with how to address climate change, one of the most significant questions is how to reduce increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One promising technology is carbon capture and sequestration (“CCS”), which consists of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and industrial sources and sequestering them in deep geologic formations for long periods of time. Areas for potential CO2 sequestration include oil and gas fields, saline aquifers, and coal seams. As Congress and the private sector begin to spend billions of dollars to research and deploy this technology, there has been insufficient attention …

Law, Biology, And Property: A New Theory Of The Endowment Effect, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context.

The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at …