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Full-Text Articles in Law
Legal Protection For Groundwater-Dependent Ecosystems, Collin Gannon
Legal Protection For Groundwater-Dependent Ecosystems, Collin Gannon
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law
This Note concerns the legal protection of groundwater-dependent ecosystems in the United States and abroad. By first describing the science and ecology of ecosystems that are dependent on groundwater and then surveying the current American legal system that fails to adequately protect groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs), this Note proposes legal reforms that could vastly improve groundwater management systems. State protection of GDEs is sparse and often only operates indirectly as a result of states’ water policies focused on water quantity upkeep for consumptive purposes. Part I provides an overview of GDEs. Part II discusses state legal protection, including indirect state protection …
Protecting Human Health And Stewarding The Environment: An Essay Exploring Values In U.S. Environmental Protection Law, Tracy Bach
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law
The purpose of this conference is to explore “the relationship between environmental protection and public health and how it should inform our efforts to become better stewards of the environment.” No one would disagree with the assertion that during the last forty years of federal environmental protection, air and water quality have improved and led to concomitant improvements in human health. Exploring the contours of this “relationship,” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy said in her keynote speech that “[t]he thing is, the word ‘relationship’ is too neutral. The link between the health of our planet and the health …
Environmental Law, Public Health, And The Values Conundrum, David M. Uhlmann
Environmental Law, Public Health, And The Values Conundrum, David M. Uhlmann
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law
In September 1996, when I was nearing the end of my sixth year as a Justice Department environmental crimes prosecutor, one of my colleagues sent me an email that there was a “good-sounding RCRA [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] knowing endangerment case developing in Idaho.” A twenty-year-old man named Scott Dominguez had collapsed inside a storage tank at an Idaho fertilizer manufacturing facility called Evergreen Resources. Mr. Dominguez could not be rescued for nearly an hour, because firefighters who responded to the scene did not know what was in the tank and what safety precautions they needed to take before …
Complex Value Choices At The Environment-Energy Interface, Hari M. Osofsky
Complex Value Choices At The Environment-Energy Interface, Hari M. Osofsky
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law
During the 2001–02 academic year, I lived in China, teaching U.S. civil rights law and helping to start a labor law clinic. My first day of teaching the fall civil rights course was the day of the September 11 attacks, and that event and reactions to it played a dominant role in my experience of that year. However, it was also a particularly interesting year to be in China from an environmental-energy perspective because the Three Gorges Dam was in the process of being built and brought onlie. At that point, the area was partially flooded and it was one …
Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime, David M. Uhlmann
Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime, David M. Uhlmann
Articles
Prosecutorial discretion exists throughout the criminal justice system but plays a particularly significant role for environmental crime. Congress made few distinctions under the environmental laws between acts that could result in criminal, civil, or administrative enforcement. As a result, there has been uncertainty about which environmental violations will result in criminal enforcement and persistent claims about the overcriminalization of environmental violations. To address these concerns — and to delineate an appropriate role for criminal enforcement in the environmental regulatory scheme — I have proposed that prosecutors should reserve criminal enforcement for violations that involve one or more of the following …