Law Commons^™

The Brave New Path Of Energy Federalism, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For much of the past 80 years courts have fixated on dual sovereignty as the organizing federalism paradigm under New Deal era energy statutes. Dual sovereignty’s reign emphasized a jurisdictional “bright line,” with a fixed, legalistic boundary between federal and state regulators. This Article explores how recent Supreme Court decisions limit dual sovereignty’s role as the organizing federalism principle under energy statutes.

These recent decisions do not approach federal-state jurisdiction as either/or proposition, but instead recognize it is concurrent in certain contexts. Concurrent jurisdiction opens up a brave new path of possibilities for energy federalism but also has been target …

Proposal For A Model State Watershed Management Act, J.B. Ruhl, C.L. Lant, Steven E. Kraft, Leslie A. Duram, Tim Loftus

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

During the Montana Constitutional Convention of 1889, John Wesley Powell, envisioning a landscape of watershed commonwealths, proposed that Montana adopt watersheds as the boundaries of its counties. The idea did not catch on. Over time, the power of local governments to regulate land use has grown immensely, but the misfit between their political boundaries and environmental policy problem sheds has persisted. As our understanding of ecosystem dynamics improves, however, natural resources management policy is gravitating, once again, to the watershed as an appropriate unit of governance. Many federal and state natural resource management initiatives have come on line in the …

The Social Meaning Of Environmental Command And Control, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

...This essay draws on the new social norms literature to examine one of the possible reasons for the public misperceptions about the sources of the remaining environmental problems. The essay suggests that one of the insights of the social norms literature, the influence of social meaning on social norms, may shed light on these misperceptions and may enrich our understanding of the difficulties encountered by efforts to control second generation sources. In particular, this essay examines two principal social meanings that appear to have been conveyed by the command and control system. The first social meaning is the conventional notion …