Law Commons^™

Natural Resources In The Arctic: The Equal Distribution Of Uneven Resrouces, Ganeswar Matcha, Sudarsanan Sivakumar

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

This paper analyses the governance machine in place at the Arctic and examines the application of the principles of “common heritage of mankind” at the Arctic. This paper also offers some tentative propositions aimed at protecting Out Bound investment rights and how the World Trade Organization or other countries, like the U.S., can intercede in the Arctic investment sphere and attempt to regulate along with the United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea.

Incentivizing Sustainability In American Enterprise: Lessons From Finnish Model, Vasa T. Dunham

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The disparate climate performances of Finland and the United States, two of the wealthiest countries in the world, bring to light the question of how corporate responsibility has been inspired in each jurisdiction. Having established the urgency of the climate crisis and the importance of corporate behavior in optimizing a given country’s approach to protection of the global environment, an examination of each nation’s legal frameworks may shed light on features of the corporate regime that are effective in advancing sustainability goals and those that are not.22 Part I of this paper establishes a comparative framework by providing background on …

Energy Justice And Renewable Rikers, Rebecca Bratspies

University of Miami Law Review

Unsustainable energy practices generate the lion’s share of global carbon emissions as well as staggering levels of deadly particulate pollution. Replacing the current dirty, fossil fuel-based system with affordable, clean energy is both a human rights imperative and a climate change necessity. This transition, which has already begun, creates the opportunity to do things differently. By confronting the structural racism embedded in existing energy structures, we can build a just transition rather than just a transition. This Article uses New York City’s Renewable Rikers project as a case study to explore how we might take advantage of the intersections between …

Seeding A Movement: Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Mariaelena Huambachano

University of Miami Law Review

For many Indigenous peoples, well-being is bound up with and inseparable from the natural world. But since colonialism, Indigenous traditions and access to traditional foods or foodways have been disrupted, imperiling their health and well-being. In this Article, I discuss the role of Indigenous cosmovision/worldview and Indigenous Food Sovereignty in achieving environmental justice. Specifically, in this Article, I discuss that despite, or perhaps because of, efforts to deny Indigenous peoples’ access to healthy and culturally appropriate foods, Indigenous Food Sovereignty took a rise of preciousness in informing natural regenerative food systems, and ultimately, “holistic/collective well-being.”

Public Health Impacts And Intra-Urban Forced Displacement Due To Climate Gentrification In The Greater Miami Area—Community Lawyering For Environmental Justice And Equitable Development, Theresa Pinto, Abigail Fleming, Sabrina Payoute, Elissa Klein

University of Miami Law Review

Because Miami-Dade County is “ground zero” for such climate effects as sea-level rise and increasingly hazardous, climate-driven Atlantic hurricanes, the coral rock ridge that runs along the Eastern coast of South Florida is a prime target for redevelopment and “climate” gentrification. Through a community and movement lawyering for environmental justice approach, we partnered with local community organizations to contribute to the ongoing work of community-driven equitable development. In partnership, we developed an environmental public health study to understand and document the public health effects on disadvantaged communities in Miami-Dade County from forced intra-urban displacement due to redevelopment that is being …

Evolving Legal Conceptions Of “Energy Communities”, Uma Outka

University of Miami Law Review

The concept of “energy communities” has had long-standing and evolving significance in the United States and in other countries around the world. Under the Biden Administration, the term “energy communities” has acquired new legal meanings that differ by context and continue to evolve. This Article traces the shifting meaning of “energy communities” and examines how it relates to other dominant references to “communities” in the context of energy law and policy, including environmental justice, low-income, underserved, and disadvantaged communities, as well as newer community-scale energy system innovations, such as community solar or “advanced energy communities.” International comparisons, such as with …

Abolition And Environmental Justice, Allegra M. Mcleod

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

During the coronavirus pandemic, movements for penal abolition and racial justice achieved dramatic growth and increased visibility. While much public discussion of abolition has centered on the call to divest from criminal law enforcement, contemporary abolitionists also understand public safety in terms of building new life-sustaining institutions and collective structures that improve human well-being, linking penal divestment to environmental justice. In urging a reimagination of public safety, abolitionists envision much more than decriminalization or a reallocation of police functions to social service agencies or other alternatives to imprisonment and policing. Instead, for abolitionists, meaningful public safety requires, among other things, …

Editor's Note, Juliette Jackson, Bailey Nickoloff

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The Sustainable Development Law and Policy Brief (“SDLP”) is celebrating twenty-two years of legal scholarship on issues related to environmental, energy, natural resources, and international development law. SDLP continues to provide cutting-edge solutions to these legal issues in the face of the global COVID-19 Pandemic, while also transitioning back into a “new normal.” This issue is no different, as we published articles challenging our lawmakers and policy heads to address the impending needs of our communities to develop more sustainable infrastructure—needs that are only exacerbated by man-made climate change. We are proud of the work published, and we are forever …

Toxic Criminals: Prosecuting Individuals For Hazardous Waste Crimes Under The United States Resource Conservation And Recovery Act, Dr. Joshua Ozymy, Dr. Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The U.S. Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (“RCRA”) contains criminal provisions which allow prosecutors to seek substantial penalties when individuals commit hazardous waste crimes involving significant harm or culpable conduct. However, our empirical understanding of enforcement outcomes is limited. We used content analysis of 2,728 criminal prosecutions derived from U.S. EPA criminal investigations from 1983 to 2021 and examined all prosecutions of individual defendants for RCRA violations. Our results show that 222 prosecutions were adjudicated, with over $72.9 million in monetary penalties, 755 years of probation, and 451 years of incarceration levied at sentencing. Seventeen percent of prosecutions centered on …

About Sdlp, Sdlp

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

The Sustainable Development Law & Policy Brief (ISSN 1552-3721) is a student-run initiative at American University Washington College of Law that is published twice each academic year. The Brief embraces an interdisciplinary focus to provide a broad view of current legal, political, and social developments. It was founded to provide a forum for those interested in promoting sustainable economic development, conservation, environmental justice, and biodiversity throughout the world.

Measuring Environmental Justice: Analysis Of Progress Under Presidents Bush, Obama, And Trump, Mollie Soloway

Student Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Looking Toward Restorative Justice For Redlined Communities Displaced By Eco-Gentrification, Helen H. Kang

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

MJEAL chose to publish Helen Kang’s piece, Looking Toward Restorative Justice for Redlined Communities Displaced by Eco-Gentrification, because it offers a unique analytic approach for analyzing the roots of environmental racism and the appropriate tools to help rectify it. She offers an argument for why restorative justice needs to be the framework and explains how we can accomplish this in the context of a whole government solution. MJEAL is excited to offer what will be an influential approach for environmental restorative justice to the broader activist and academic community.

Of Sex Crimes And Fencelines: How Recognition Of Environmental Justice Communities As Crime Victims Under State And Federal Law Can Help Secure Environmental Justice, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa L. Jarrell

Pace Environmental Law Review

Environmental justice communities throughout the United States continue to face disproportionate health burdens from living near industrial sources of pollution. Such burdens were caused by historically racist public policies and continue to be perpetuated by inadequate regulatory responses at the federal and state level. State and federal law has increasingly recognized an emerging set of rights afforded to victims of crime in court proceedings. We argue that members of environmental justice communities should be viewed as crime victims and have the same rights applied as other victims of violent crime. Using case examples under the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act …

Unveiling The “Trojan Horses” Of Gentrification: Studies Of Legal Strategies To Combat Environmental Gentrification In Washington, D.C. And New York, N.Y., Sarena Malsin

Pace Environmental Law Review

No abstract provided.

Environmental Justice In Little Village: A Case For Reforming Chicago’S Zoning Law, Charles Isaacs

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Chicago’s Little Village community bears the heavy burden of environmental injustice and racism. The residents are mostly immigrants and people of color who live with low levels of income, limited access to healthcare, and disproportionate levels of dangerous air pollution. Before its retirement, Little Village’s Crawford coal-burning power plant was the lead source of air pollution, contributing to 41 deaths, 550 emergency room visits, and 2,800 asthma attacks per year. After the plant’s retirement, community members wanted a say on the future use of the lot, only to be closed out when a corporation, Hilco Redevelopment Partners, bought the lot …

Environmental Justice And The Possibilities For Environmental Law, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Climate change and extreme inequality combine to cause disproportionate harms to poor communities throughout the world. Further, unequal resource allocation is shot through with the structures of racism and other forms of discrimination. This Essay explores these phenomena in two different places in the United States, and traces law’s role in constructing environmental and economic vulnerability. The Essay then proposes that solutions, if there are any to be had, lie in expanding our notions of what kinds of laws are relevant to achieving environmental justice, and in seeing law as a possible tactic for instigating broader social change but not …

Clean Energy Justice: Charting An Emerging Agenda, Shelley Welton, Joel B. Eisen

All Faculty Scholarship

The rapid transition to clean energy is fraught with potential inequities. As clean energy policies ramp up in scale and ambition, they confront challenging new questions: Who should pay for the transition? Who should live next to the industrial-scale wind and solar farms these policies promote? Will the new “green” economy be a fairer one, with more widespread opportunity, than the fossil fuel economy it is replacing? Who gets to decide what kinds of resources power our decarbonized world? In this article, we assert that it is useful to understand these challenges collectively, as part of an emerging agenda of …

Address At The Lincoln Charter Of The Forest Conference, Bishop Grosseteste University: The Charter Of The Forest: Evolving Human Rights In Nature, Nicholas A. Robinson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This conference is a singular event, long over due. It has been 258 years since William Blackstone celebrated “these two sacred charters,”1 Carta de Foresta and Magna Carta, with his celebrated publication of their authentic texts. In 2015, the Great Charter of Liberties enjoyed scholarly, political and popular focus. The companion Forest Charter was and is too much neglected.2 I salute the American Bar Association, and Dan Magraw, for the ABA’s educational focus of the Forest Charter, as well as Magna Carta. Today we restore some balance with this conference’s searching and insightful examination of the Forest Charter’s significance.

Agenda: Indigenous Water Justice Symposium, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment

Indigenous Water Justice Symposium (June 6)

Indigenous peoples throughout the world face diverse and often formidable challenges of what might be termed “water justice.” On one hand, these challenges involve issues of distributional justice that concern Indigenous communities’ relative abilities to access and use water for self-determined purposes. On the other hand, issues of procedural justice are frequently associated with water allocation and management, encompassing fundamental matters like representation within governance entities and participation in decision-making processes. Yet another realm of water justice in which disputes are commonplace relates to the persistence of, and respect afforded to, Indigenous communities’ cultural traditions and values surrounding water—more specifically, …

Heredity In The Epigenetic Era: Are We Facing A Politics Of Reproductive Obligations?, Michael J. Crawford

Biological Sciences Publications

Recent research in the emerging field of epigenetics has implications with the potential to re-ignite acrimony in the discourse of reproductive rights, medical ethics, and the role of the state in our homes and in our lives. For scientists, epigenetics has profoundly realigned our understanding of heredity: epigenetics provides a mechanism through which the environmental challenges met in one generation can be inscribed and transmitted to future offspring. Although both genetic parents have the potential to transmit heritable epigenetic changes to their offspring, mothers have a particularly potent effect because nutrition in the uterine environment can exert a supplemental effect …

Deadly Waiting Game: An Environmental Justice Framework For Examining Natural And Man-Made Disasters Beyond Hurricane Katrina [Abstract], Robert D. Bullard

Robert D Bullard

Presenter: Robert D. Bullard, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Clark Atlanta University 1 page.

Texas Colonias: Injustice By Definition, Caitlin Lewis

Environmental and Earth Law Journal (EELJ)

Colonias are usually characterized as rural or semi-rural slums inhabited by Mexican-origin immigrants and Mexican Americans. This Comment examines the socioeconomic and environmental burdens faced by Texas colonias and the public and private attempts to address these hardships.

Vulnerability And Power In The Age Of The Anthropocene, Angela Harris

Angela P Harris

No abstract provided.

Health Law As Social Justice, Lindsay Wiley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Health law is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. From a relatively narrow discipline focused on regulating relationships among individual patients, health care providers, and third-party payers, it is expanding into a far broader field with a burgeoning commitment to access to health care and assurance of healthy living conditions as matters of social justice. Through a series of incremental reform efforts stretching back decades before the Affordable Care Act and encompassing public health law as well as the law of health care financing and delivery, reducing health disparities has become a central focus of American health law and …

Symbolic Politics For Disempowered Communities: State Environmental Justice Policies, Tonya Lewis, Jessica Owley

Articles

No abstract provided.

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

Daniel A Farber

Stasis And Change In Environmental Law: The Past, Present And Future Of The Fordham Environmental Law Review, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

The past twenty years of environmental law are marked as much by legislative stasis as by profound change in the way that lawyers, policymakers, and scholars interact with the field. Although no new federal legislation was passed over the past two decades, much has changed about the field of environmental law. This change is the result of a set of conceptual and legal challenges to the field posed by intellectual and policy movements that took root in the early 1990s. The intellectual and policy movements that have most profoundly shaped the field of environmental law in the past twenty years …

Arctic Justice: Addressing Persistent Organic Pollutants, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

This article recommends enhanced governance of persistent organic pollutants through incentives to develop environmentally sound, climate friendly technologies as well as caution in developing the Arctic. It highlights the toxicity challenges presented by POPs to Arctic people and ecosystems.

Environmental Justice And Eschatology In Revelation, Jonathan C. Augustine

Jonathan C. Augustine

The concept of environmental justice is not new. While some scholars and activists trace its origins as part of the ongoing American Civil Rights Movement—a movement which emerged within the interdisciplinary connection of law and religion—this Essay argues that the concept of environmental justice has deep origins in the Holy Bible. With a foundation in the Old Testament Hebrew scriptures, this Essay combines the disciplines of law and religion by arguing that the Book of Revelation should be read ecologically, as a clarion call to protect the environment in anticipation of the time the triune God will return to live …

Looking Backward From The Year 2099: Ecozoic Reflections On The Future, Samuel Alexander

Environmental and Earth Law Journal (EELJ)

Looking Backward from the Year 2099: Ecozoic Reflections on the Future

Abstract by Samuel Alexander

Story, myth, and narrative played a central role in Thomas Berry’s writings. He told new stories about the Universe and our place in it, stories not only about where we have been and where we seem to be going, but also stories about where we could go, if only we exercised our freedom in different ways. Inspired by Berry, in this paper I have dared to experiment with story, by attempting to look back on the 21st century from the vantage point of the year …