Law Commons^™

When Government Intrudes: Regulating Individual Behaviors That Harm The Environment, Katrina Fischer Kuh

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Emerging environmental problems and technologies, coupled with the existence of mature regulatory regimes governing most industrial sources of pollution, reveal with new clarity the harms that individual behaviors can inflict on the environment. Changing how individuals impact the environment through their daily behaviors, however, requires a reorientation of environmental law and policy and a balancing of government prerogatives with individual liberty. A growing body of legal scholarship recognizes the environmental significance of individual behaviors, critiques the failure of law and policy to capture harms traceable to individuals, and suggests and evaluates strategies for capturing individual harms going forward. In this …