Law Commons^™

Florida's Impaired Waters Rule: Is There A "Method" To The Madness?, Cynthia D. Norgart

Florida State University Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law

No abstract provided.

Federalism, Regulatory Architecture, And The Clean Water Rule: Seeking Consensus On The Waters Of The United States, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

This article reviews the troubled history of the “Waters of the United States” Rule of the Clean Water Act, and analyzes how its newest incarnation harnesses a surprising point of convergence between the conflicting Supreme Court interpretations in Rapanos v. United States that necessitated its development. While debate over the federalism implications of the Rule rages on, the framework it creates from the multiple Rapanos opinions suggests that the path forward hinges less on the substantive rule of jurisdiction and more on the regulatory architecture of presumptions, default rules, and burden shifting. Splitting the difference between competing judicial approaches, the …

Scale Economies, Scale Externalities: Hog Farming And The Changing American Agricultural Industry, Shi-Ling Hsu

Scholarly Publications

American agriculture is inexorably concentrating into the hands of a small number of large conglomerates. Expanding farms pursuing scale economies would normally have to abide by a system of environmental and other laws that would, in theory, require farms to account for negative externalities. If those laws were observed and enforced, they would help strike a balance between the greater profitability and the larger externalities of scaling up. But these laws are not widely observed nor rigorously enforced, which upsets this balance and gives large-scale farms a cost advantage while insulating them from corresponding responsibilities.

Perhaps nowhere in agriculture is …

The Failure And Future Of Lake Okeechobee Water Releases: A Quasi-Governmental Solution, Jacquelyn A. Thomas

Florida State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Remedying Regulatory Diseconomies Of Scale, Hannah J. Wiseman

Scholarly Publications

Rules in the modern administrative state tend to lag behind reality, and a key contributor to this stickiness – the volume of regulated activity – is largely ignored. When legislators or agency staff initially write rules to constrain the externalities of an activity, they assume that the activity will occur at a particular scale. Based on the known impacts at this scale, policymakers and regulators balance the harms of the regulated activity against the costs of regulation to industry, striking a compromise within the chosen rule or choosing to not regulate at all.

If the activity later expands from this …

The Spending Power And Environmental Law After Sebelius, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, a plurality of the Supreme Court held that portions of the Affordable Care Act exceeded federal authority under the Spending Clause. With that holding, Sebelius became the first Supreme Court decision since the New Deal to limit an act of Congress on spending-power grounds, rounding out the “New Federalism” limits on federal power first initiated by the Rehnquist Court in the 1990s. The new Sebelius doctrine constrains the federal spending power in contexts involving changes to ongoing intergovernmental partnerships with very large federal grants. However, the decision gives little direction for …

The Spending Power And Environmental Law After Sebelius, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

This article analyzes the Supreme Court’s new spending power doctrine and its impact on state-federal bargaining in programs of cooperative federalism, using the laboratory of environmental law. (It expands on the legal analysis in an Issue Brief originally published by the American Constitution Society on Oct. 1, 2013.) After the Supreme Court ruled in the highly charged Affordable Care Act case of 2012, National Federation of Independent Business vs. Sebelius, the political arena erupted in debate over the implications for the health reform initiative and, more generally, the reach of federal law. Analysts fixated on the decision’s dueling Commerce Clause …