Law Commons^™

Global Climate Change Offers Hot Career Opportunities, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Michael Gerrard, editor of Global Climate Change and U.S. Law, is passionate about global warming and the role lawyers can play in improving the environment. Student Lawyer's Donna Gerson talks to Gerrard about his career path and how law students can make a difference combating climate change.

Corn Futures: Consumer Politics, Health, And Climate Change, Jedediah S. Purdy, James Salzman

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of corn has brought great benefits, but its large and growing costs have also become increasingly clear. In this Article, we explore the unprecedented roles of corn in our economy, explain how law and policy have shaped these roles, uncover the environmental and social impacts of corn, and consider how to think of consumption in this context. If voting-by-buying is an increasingly relevant model of consumer engagement, can we envision consumers being presented with choices that address the social and environmental harms from our dependence on corn? More generally, how should we think about consumer engagement, both its …

Financial Disclosure Of Risks Related To Global Climate Change, Michael B. Gerrard, Christopher Anderson

Faculty Scholarship

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations require publicly traded companies to disclose the material impacts of environmental laws on their business. Increasing attention is being paid to the issue of securities disclosure of financial risks and opportunities posed by impending regulation relating to global climate change and by climate change itself.

Climate Change And The Limits Of The Possible, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Climate change looks to be more than just another environmental problem. It threatens to test the limits of our dominant ways of understanding and solving, not just environmental problems, but problems of political economy generally. Climate change has distinctive temporal and spatial features – how long it takes to unfold and the ways in which its effects are distributed across the globe – which may outstrip the capacity of our basic principles of economic and political decision-making. If so, then understanding the issue in a static way may ensure that we expect to fail in addressing it and are inarticulate …

The Permissible Reach Of National Environmental Policies, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Trading nations exchange tariff concessions in the context of trade liberalizing rounds. Tariffs, nonetheless, are not the only instrument affecting the value of a concession. Domestic instruments affect it as well, but public order is not negotiable, and, consequently, is not scheduled. Public order is unilaterally defined, but must respect the default rules concerning allocation of jurisdiction which are common to all WTO Members and bind them by virtue of their appurtenance to the international community. In this paper, we focus on the interaction between trade and environment. The purpose of this study is to highlight how these rules and …

Mccain Vs. Obama On Environment, Energy, And Resources, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

For the first time in living memory, the environment is receiving significant attention in a presidential election. Both Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) have given speeches and run television advertisements on the issue and (after a slow start) are being asked questions by the national press about where they stand on climate change and energy.

This article compares the actions and positions of the two candidates on environmental, energy, and resources issues. It begins by looking at their voting records, presents their endorsements and campaign contributions, and then discusses their positions as shown in their campaign …

Climate Change And The Environmental Impact Review Process, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

In the explosion of modern environmental law that occurred in the 1970s, the first major statute was the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321-4347, signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon on January 1, 1970. It spawned "little NEPAs" in about twenty-five states and eighty countries. Council on Environmental Quality, The National Environmental Quality Act: A Study of Its Effectiveness After Twenty-Five Years (1997). All of these laws were designed to require governments to consider environmental issues in their decisions. The chief mechanism of NEPA and its state equivalents is the preparation of environmental impact statements …

Seqra And Climate Change, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

New York's State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) is the centerpiece of environmental decision-making in the state. It requires state and local agencies to prepare environmental impact statements (EISs) for actions that could significantly affect the environment. SEQRA has become the principal framework for the identification and mitigation of environmental impacts.

The text of SEQRA provides that EISs should discuss the "effects of the proposed action on the use and conservation of energy resources, where applicable and significant." EISs under SEQRA are also required to consider, among many other things, a project's effects on air pollution. Since the main source …

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 …