Law Commons^™

Droughts, Floods, And Wildfires: Paleo Perspectives On Diaster Law In The Anthropocene, Ryan Stoa

Ryan B. Stoa

Humanity's impact on the earth has become so pronounced that momentum is building toward adopting a new term for the modem geological age-the "Anthropocene." The term signifies that human activity has reached a scale that it is now a planetary force capable of shaping ecosystems and natural processes. And yet, anthropocentric natural resources management and environmental lawmaking in the United States reveal a lack of control in managing natural systems and fostering resilience to extreme events. These systems do not easily conform to the whims of reactionary environmental policies. Droughts, floods, and wildfires, in particular are often conceptualized as unforeseeable …

What The Frack? How Weak Industrial Disclosure Rules Prevent Public Understanding Of Chemical Practices And Toxic Politics, Benjamin W. Cramer

Benjamin W. Cramer

Hydraulic fracturing, known colloquially as “fracking,” makes use of chemically-formulated fluid that is forced down a gas well at great pressure to fracture underground rock formations and release embedded natural gas. Many journalists, environmentalists, and public health advocates are concerned about what may happen if the fracking fluid escapes the well and contaminates nearby drinking water supplies. This article attempts a comprehensive analysis and comparison of all relevant fracking fluid disclosure regulations currently extant in the United States, and considers whether the information gained is truly useful for citizens, journalists, and regulators. In recent years the federal government and several …

Economics-Based Environmentalism In The Fourth Generation Of Environmental Law, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Environmental protection and economic concerns are not mutually exclusive. This article explores some of the issues of economic analysis that might arise as we approach the fourth generation of environmental law. It explains ways that economic analysis can be employed to generate the best environmental rules, including measures under what this article terms as "economics-based environmentalism." Economics-based environmentalism contends that the advantages of using economic principles within a “polycentric toolbox” of environmental law come from the benefits available in private ordering, markets, property rights, liability regimes and incentives structures that will better protect the environment than alternatives like state-based interventionist, …

Disaster Law And Policy, Daniel Farber, Jim Chen, Robert Verchick, Lisa Grow Sun

Daniel A Farber

The Implementation Gap: What Causes Laws To Succeed Or Fail?, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

It is important to go behind the “paper systems” many countries and private sector actors have created to manufacture the appearance of commitments to responsible economic activity, environmental protection and social justice. This produces the need to penetrate the veils that mask governments’ “apparent compliance” with the terms of sustainable development, and to be honest about the inability of voluntary codes of practice to shape the behavior of business and government. Implementation requires effective systems to carry out the law and policy mandates. Laws and policies are often poorly designed or deliberately sabotaged in their creation, but in many instances …

The Reality Of Business And Governmental Decision-Making In The Context Of Sustainable Development, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

It is absolutely rational for economic actors and decision-makers to seek to operate in their own self-interest. The challenge for anyone who wishes to influence or alter the process lies in knowing where that self-interest lies and changing the nature of the self-interest if that is required or possible. That is a far greater challenge than many understand because regardless of what we might like to do in our personal lives, it is the institution within which we work that dictates how we think and what we value in our service to that institution. Given the short time frame within …

New “Architecture” And Revitalizing The Un Global Compact, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

Some advocates of sustainable development possess an almost theological faith in what I refer to as “rhetorical” sustainable development as the path to providing for the sound future of human civilizations and critical ecological systems. Simply put, if we try to think “too big” and “bite off too much” then the system we are trying to control or influence consumes us and our resources and we fail miserably. There is real and predictable danger in grandeur. This means we need to think about achieving sustainability in very specific and concrete terms applied to clear goals and an honest understanding of …

The Transatlantic Gmo Dispute Against The European Communities: Some Preliminary Thoughts, David A. Wirth

David A. Wirth

Any day now, a World Trade Organization panel is expected to rule in a dispute between the U.S. and the EU concerning market access for genetically-engineered foods and crops. This piece, written before the release of the WTO panel's report, analyzes novel systemic issues concerning the impact of WTO law on regulatory design, at both the national and international levels, that are raised by this dispute. These include (1) the application of WTO disciplines to regulatory schemes that require prior governmental approval to protect the environment and public health from newly-introduced products and substances; (2) the role of precaution as …

At War With The Environment, David A. Wirth

David A. Wirth

In this Article, Professor Wirth reviews the book National Defense and the Environment by Stephen Dycus, a recognized expert in both environmental and national security law. The emphasis of the book is on containing and remediating the environmental excesses of the American defense-industrial complex, with a domestic policy focus. While Professor Wirth considers Dycus’ work an intellectually rewarding and refreshing new entry into the ongoing environment-as-security colloquy, he does not consider the book to be accessible to a general audience given the book’s fundamentally legalistic nature.

Environmental Law And Three Economies: Navigating A Sprawling Field Of Study, Practice, And Societal Governance In Which Everything Is Connected To Everything Else, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

The vast sprawl of the environmental law field makes it a bemusing and confounding puzzle even to those who pursue it as their primary academic vocation. The amorphous breadth and intricate depths of environmental law present special challenges to anyone who tries to navigate the field. This Article addresses several of these challenges, briefly analyzing how environmental curricula are designed, and then suggests a potentially useful new way to conceptualize the realm of environmental law.

The Embattled Social Utilities Of The Endangered Species Act - A Noah Presumption And Caution Against Putting Gasmasks On The Canaries In The Coalmine, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is once again poised at the brink of what could become an illuminating national debate. The Act’s congressional reauthorization process is likely to provide the first major indicator of what the 105th Congress will or won’t do to environmental law generally. From the turbulent past and present of the ESA, this essay offers some reminders for the impending battles over the Act.

Keynote Essay: A Modern Political Tribalism In Natural Resources Management, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

The first law of ecology holds that everything is connected to everything else. This conference addresses the challenges and dilemmas of resource management policy on America’s public lands, but it seems useful both for the purposes of the conference and in broader terms to note how resource management is connected to larger questions of global integrity and human governance. This essay explores a troubling fact of modern political life: As the problems of managing the economy and ecology of this nation become ever more complex, subtly-interrelated, pressured and demanding, our processes of legal and political governance might be expected to …

The Right To Counsel Fees In Public Interest Environmental Litigation, Zygmunt J.B. Plater, Joseph H. King Jr

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

No abstract provided.

Dealing With Dumb And Dumber: The Continuing Mission Of Citizen Environmentalism, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Surveying the history of citizen environmentalism in the context of environmental law and politics over the past fifty years, this essay hypothesizes five different categories of corporate, governmental, political, and individual actions that deserve to be called “dumb,” and the societal lessons that have been or could be learned from each. If there is truth to the wistful aphorism that “we learn from our mistakes,” then our society is in position to learn a great deal about our world and how it works, which perhaps provides some ground for hope for the years to come. Environmentalism embodies fundamentally rational and …

Endangered Species Act Lessons Over 30 Years, And The Legacy Of The Snail Darter, A Small Fish In A Pork Barrel, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Why is it – amidst the flood of environmental statutes that poured into the law books and national consciousness in the remarkable decade of the 1970s – that the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) stands out as quite uniquely different? This Essay briefly surveys the ESA’s differentness, its special political context, the citizen suit of great notoriety that fired up the ESA’s political hotseat back in 1975, and what has changed and what has not in the years since that first eco-legal outburst.

Reflected In A River: Agency Accountability And The Tva Tellico Dam Case, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Legal history is usually written from one of two time perspectives: as a narrative of events and changing conditions over a span of years or as an extended exploration of one fertile moment in time. In examining the intriguing entity known as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), this article draws upon that chronological history to some extent. To a greater extent, however, it focuses upon revealing moments in the last six years of the long-running battles over completion of the TVA’s Tellico dam, which finally flooded the last remaining stretch of the Little Tennessee River Valley in the spring of …

Law, Media, & Environmental Policy: A Fundamental Linkage In Sustainable Democratic Governance, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

The functional linkages between law and media have long been signficant in shaping American democratic governance. Over the past thirty-five years, environmental analysis has similarly become essential to shaping international and domestic governmental policy. Environmentalism—focusing as it does on realistic interconnected accounting of the full potential negative consequences as well as benefits of proposed actions, policies, and programs, over the long term as well as the short term, with careful consideration of all realistic alternatives— provides a legal perspective important for societal sustainability. Because environmental values and norms are often in tension with established industrial interests that resist public interest …

Environmental Law In The Political Ecosystem - Coping With The Reality Of Politics, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

In this Essay, the proposition the author draws from the narrative of the endangered species litigation is derivatively Aristotelian – that we must consciously, actively, and explicitly integrate an informed consideration of human politics into what we teach and do in environmental law. The proposition is not that we should steep ourselves in party politics, although there are interesting observations aplenty that could be made on the direct consequences that the two major parties (and occassionally their wistful smaller incarnations) have on the evolution of environmental law. The proposition offered here operates at two different levels: practical politics and political …

Facing A Time Of Counter-Revolution: The Kepone Incident And A Review Of First Principles, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

The Kepone contamination episode of 1966-75 was a milestone that focused an entire nation’s attention on environmental hazards and our need to do better in recognizing and avoiding them. We have learned a great deal from that unfortunate story. The evolution of American environmental law since the Kepone debacle has repeatedly used the incident as a touchstone in identifying environmental pollution’s causes, effects, and potential solutions. This essay offers four propositions, about two things that have changed, and two things that have not, in the years since Kepone, taking account of where we are, and seeking some points of consensus.

The Three Economies: An Essay In Honor Of Joseph Sax, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

How does one evaluate the important public values and impacts of things that do not have a market price and then integrate them into the fabric of our system of social governance? That question lies within most or all of Joseph Sax's work over the years. The first part of this article represents an attempt to distill some of Joseph Sax's intellectual dimensions, beyond those already chronicled in the comments of other contributors to this symposium, with some linked themes and observations drawn from Sax beyond his writings. The second part, instigated by several of Sax's articles, presents "The Three …

A Federal Obligation, Robert R.M. Verchick

Robert R.M. Verchick

No abstract provided.

An Unnatural Disaster: The Aftermath Of Hurricane Katrina, David Driesen, Alyson Flournoy, Sheila Foster, Eileen Gauna, Robert Glicksman, Carmen Gonzalez, David Gottlieb, Donald Hornstein, Douglas Kysar, Thomas Mcgarity, Catherine O'Neill, Clifford Rechtschaffen, Sidney Shapiro, Christopher Schroeder, Rena Steinzor, Joseph Tomain, Robert R.M. Verchick, Karen Sokol

Robert R.M. Verchick

No abstract provided.

Critical Space Theory: Keeping Local Geography In American And European Environmental Law, Robert R.M. Verchick

Robert R.M. Verchick

Recently, legal scholars have begun to explore the meaning and significance of geographic space in law within the United States and internationally, a project highlighted in a 1996 Stanford Law Review symposium. Much of this discussion draws implicitly and explicitly on critical legal theory in approaching geographic themes -- suggesting the beginning of what the author calls "Critical Space Theory." This article uses Critical Space Theory to address the legal significance of geography in relation to two environmental issues in the United States and the European Union: (1) transborder waste transportation and (2) judicial standing. Each issue raises questions of …