Law Commons^™

The Exoskeleton Of Environmental Law: Why The Breadth, Depth, And Longevity Of Environmental Law Matters For Judicial Review, Sanne H. Knudsen

Utah Law Review

Environmental law is pragmatic, inevitable, and intentional. In the aggregate, the numerous federal environmental statutes are not simply a patchwork of ad hoc responses or momentary political breakthroughs to isolated public health problems and resource concerns. Together, they are a group of repeated, legislatively-backed commitments to embrace selfrestraint for self-preservation.

Self-restraint and discipline are the essence of environmental law. Indeed, if one studies the patterns and repeated choices in environmental law’s many statutory texts, one can start to appreciate environmental law’s indispensable role in society: it serves as an enduring “exoskeleton,” a sort of protective armor created over time to …

Emerging Best Practices In International Atmospheric Trust Case Law, Rachel M. Pemberton, Michael Blumm

Utah Law Review

With climate change litigation proliferating throughout the world, a substantial body of case law is emerging. As part of a project of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law's Climate Change Specialist Group, this Article, a version of which will be included in a “Judicial Handbook on Climate Litigation,” explains the public trust doctrine’s influence on climate change litigation internationally. We select what we view as judicial “best practices” as a kind of restatement of international atmospheric trust law in 2022. International atmospheric trust law is at the forefront of many best practices, as state and federal courts in the …

A Sand County Tax Shelter: Syndicated Conservation Easements And Their Toll On The American Taxpayer, Jimmy Godin

Utah Law Review

The conservation easement is a powerful tool for conserving private land in the United States and beyond. Among the many incentives for encouraging conservation easement donations are tax deductions, which largely depend on the conservation value of the donated land. But groups of wealthy taxpayers, accountants, attorneys, and appraisers are manipulating the conservation easement tax framework and receiving large tax deductions for conservation easements that are practically worthless in a conservation sense—transactions known as 'syndicated conservation easements.' Syndicated conservation easements have generated substantial controversy, in part because they cost American taxpayers billions of tax dollars annually. While the Internal Revenue …

Constitutional Authority, Common Resources, And The Climate, Anthony Moffa

Utah Law Review

History, text, and precedent reveal an understudied and underutilized source of constitutional authority for environmental protection—the Property Clause of Article IV, Section 3. The Clause vests Congress with the “Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.” This work re-examines these words, the context in which they were written, and the limited judicial decisions interpreting them with an eye towards increased congressional reliance on the Property Clause in the face of daunting threats to our natural environment. Much prior scholarly explanation of the Property Clause focused …

Information As Power: Democratizing Environmental Data, Annie Brett

Utah Law Review

Environmental data systems have largely escaped scrutiny in the past decades. But these systems are the foundations for evaluating environmental priorities, making management decisions, and deciding which perspectives to value. Information is the foundation of effective regulation. The decisions regulators make about gathering, assimilating, and sharing information are, in many cases, determinative of the outcomes they reach. This is certainly true in the case of the environment.

This paper looks at how current environmental regulation has created data systems that undermine scientific legitimacy and systematically prevent stakeholder participation in environmental decision-making. These data systems concentrate power within federal and state …