Law Commons^™

A Case Study In The Intersection Of Law And Science: The 1999 Report Of The Committee Of Scientists, Charles F. Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Toward A Greener Gatt: Environmental Trade Measures And The Shrimp-Turtle Case, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Land Use, Science, And Spirituality: The Search For A True And Lasting Relationship With The Land, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Annihilation Of Sea Turtles: Wto Intransigence And U.S. Equivocation, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

No abstract provided.

Reforming State Brownfield Programs To Comply With Title Vi, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Many states have adopted voluntary action programs to encourage developers to clean up and redevelop brownfields, former industrial or commercial facilities that have some environmental contamination. While brownfields redevelopment often has important benefits, states often allow cleanups that are less stringent than would otherwise be required and that raises the possibility that redevelopment could pose health risks to neighboring residents. Because many brownfield sites are located in areas with significant minority populastions, there is the potential for disproportionate impacts against these groups. If disparate impacts occur, states are arguably liable under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The …

South, North, International Environmental Law, And International Environmental Lawyers, Karin Mickelson

All Faculty Publications

The author argues that international environmental law as a discipline has failed to respond to Third World concerns in a meaningful fashion. It has merely accommodated these concerns at the margins, as opposed to integrating them into the core of the discipline and its self-understanding. Two aspects of the standard, "accommodationist," approach are considered: (1) the tendency to provide an ahistorical account of the evolution of international environmental law; (2) the implicit or explicit portrayal of the South as a grudging participant in environmental regimes rather than being recognized as an active partner in an ongoing effort to identify the …

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Recent case developments in Insurance Law in the years 1999 and 2000.

Clear Consensus, Ambiguous Commitment, Christopher H. Schroeder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Should Lucas V. South Carolina Coastal Council Protect Where The Wild Things Are? Of Beavers, Bob-O-Links, And Other Things That Go Bump In The Night, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council is one of several recent Supreme Court decisions in which the Court used the Just Compensation Clause as a "weapon of reaction" to strike down an offending land use restriction. In Lucas, the target of the Court's animus was a state law prohibiting a landowner from developing two beachfront lots. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the law as a legitimate exercise of the State's police power to protect the public from harm in the face of a takings challenge by the landowner. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the South Carolina court's talismatic …

Trends In The Supply And Demand For Environmental Lawyers, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The boom times for environmental lawyers were the late 1980s and the early 1990s. The June 1990 issue of Money magazine called environmental law a "fast-track career." Two or three years of experience with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a state environmental agency, the environmental units of the Justice Department, or a state attorney general's office were a ticket to a high-paying job in the private sector. Law students were clamoring to enter the field and law firms were scrambling to find experienced environmental lawyers, or to recycle newly underemployed antitrust lawyers into this burgeoning field.

Explaining Market Mechanisms, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, environmental regulation has seen a debate between supporters of traditional command-and-control regulation – a system of uniform pollution control standards – and proponents of a system of fees or permits for individual polluters known as market mechanisms. In this article, Professor Merrill considers two theories, wealth-maximization theory and distributional theory, that have been used to explain the emergence of market mechanisms in American environmental policy. He notes that (1) relatively few American environmental-enforcement programs have adopted market mechanisms; (2) those that exist overwhelmingly use grandfathered transferable permits instead of pollution taxes or auctioned permits; and (3) they …

Environmental Justice And Natural Areas Protection Trends & Insight, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

There are 3,119,963 square miles in the continental United States. That sounds like plenty of space to put just about anything. However, when the facility seeking a home is environmentally controversial, finding even one square mile can seem almost impossible.

This country is now in its third major era in making siting decisions. The first era – unconstrained siting – lasted until the late 1960s. Then began the second era – protecting natural areas. In the early 1990s, we embarked upon a third era – environmental justice. The growing tensions between protecting natural areas and achieving environmental justice suggest that …

The Ocean And International Environmental Law: Swimming, Sinking, And Treading Water At The Millennium, Douglas M. Johnston, David Vanderzwaag

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Various images help capture the status and trends of international law and policy efforts to protect the ocean environment. While “treading water” and “sinking” partly describe legal conditions at the millennium, this paper examines seven challenges in the international environmental law field which at the very least promise to make for a “hard swim” in coming decades. Those challenges include: coping with the proliferation of negotiated instruments; overcoming political opposition to environmental commitments; clarifying the jurisprudential underpinnings of international environmental law; sorting out the relation of environmental ethics, science and the rule of law; fleshing out the principles of sustainable …