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Environmental Citizen Suits And The Inequities Of Races To The Top, David E. Adelman, Jory Reilly-Diakun

University of Colorado Law Review

Environmental citizen suits were founded on the belief that empowering organizations and individuals to take legal action would provide a backstop against lax federal or state programs. Working in conjunction with the system of cooperative federalism, citizen suits were designed to uphold minimum levels of environmental protection and to provide a restraint on so called "races to the bottom" in which states compete for economic development by relaxing environmental standards. To our knowledge, no one has considered whether the geographic distribution of citizen suits could have the opposite effect-namely, that it reinforces rather than mitigates disparities in the levels of …