Law Commons^™

The Birth, Death, And Afterlife Of The Wild Lands Policy: The Evolution Of The Bureau Of Land Management’S Authority To Protect Wilderness Values, Olivia Brumfield

Michael Blumm

Since the enactment of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) in 1976, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has had a troubled relationship with wild lands, the nation’s last remaining places with wilderness characteristics. Although for twenty-five years BLM recognized wilderness values as a resource it must balance and could protect consistent with the agency’s multiple use mandate, in 2003 BLM largely disclaimed that interpretation, potentially imperiling future protection of wild lands that were not designated as wilderness or wilderness study areas. Since then, the agency has made incremental – but potentially powerful – steps toward reclaiming a …

Antimonopoly And The Radical Lochean Origins Of Western Water Law, Michael Blumm

Michael Blumm

This review of David Schorr's book, The Colorado Doctrine: Water Rights, Corporations, and Distributive Justice on the American Frontier, maintains that the book is a therapeutic corrective to the standard history of the origins of western water law as celebration of economic efficiency and wealth maximization. Schorr's account convincingly contends that the roots of prior appropriation water law--the "Colorado Doctrine"--lie in distributional justice concerns, not in the supposed efficiency advantages of private property over common property. The goals of the founders of the Colorado doctrine, according to Schorr, were to advance Radical Lochean principles such as widespread distibution of water …

The Public Trust In Wildlife, Michael Blumm, Aurora Paulsen

Michael Blumm

The public trust doctrine, derived from ancient property principles, is thought to mostly apply to navigable waters and related land resources. The doctrine supplies a mediating force to claims of both private ownership and unfettered government discretion over these resources, vesting the state with trust responsibility to ensure that the use of these resources promotes long-term sustainability. A related doctrine—sovereign ownership of wildlife—is also an ancient public property doctrine inherited from England. State ownership of wildlife has long defeated private ownership claims and enabled states to enact and implement wildlife conservation regulations. This paper claims that these two doctrines should …

Dam Breaching In The Pacific Northwest: Lessons For The Nation, Michael Blumm

Michael Blumm

Over the past dozen years, a number of large dams in the Pacific Northwest have been removed in an effort to restore riverine ecosystems and dependent species like salmon. These dam removals provide perhaps the best example of large-scale environmental remediation in the 21st century. This restoration, however, has occurred on a case-by-case basis, without a comprehensive plan. Yet the result has been to put into motion ongoing rehabilitation efforts in four distinct river basins: the Elwah and White Salmon in Washington and the Sandy and Rogue in Oregon. In all, nine significant dams have been removed, and four more—in …

Pluralism And The Environment Revisted: The Role Of Comment Agencies In Nepa Litigation, Michael Blumm

Michael Blumm

The National Environmental Policy Act suffers from a declining reputation due to high expectations and misunderstood implementation. The U.S. Supreme Court has disappointed environmental advocates by repeatedly ruling that NEPA does not impose substantive obligations to protect the environment that are judicially enforceable. As a result, some critics have characterized NEPA as a mere paperwork statute, imposing only bureaucratic red tape. Nevertheless, some courts have read NEPA to require close judicial scrutiny of federal agency actions with significant environmental consequences and have enjoined agency proposals that do not publicly disclose those consequences. The problem is that the level of judicial …

The Oregon And California Railroad Grant Lands’ Sordid Past, Contentious Present, And Uncertain Future: A Century Of Conflict, Michael Blumm

Michael Blumm

This article examines the long, contentious history of the Oregon & California Land Grant that produced federal forest lands now managed by the Bureau of Land Management (“O&C lands”), including an analysis of how these lands re-vested to the federal government following decades of corruption and scandal, and the resulting congressional effort that created a management structure supporting local county governments through overharvesting the lands for a half-century. The article proceeds to trace the fate of O&C lands through the “spotted owl wars” of the 1990s, the ensuing Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), the timber salvage rider of 1995, and the …

The Role Of The Judge In Endangered Species Act Litigation: District Judge James Redden And The Columbia Basin Salmon Saga, Michael C. Blumm, Aurora Paulsen

Michael Blumm

After rejecting three federal biological opinions (BiOps) for favoring federal Columbia Basin hydroelectric operations over salmon protected by the Endangered Species Act (ESA), Judge James A. Redden has retired, passing oversight of the litigation to a new federal judge. This complex case, which concerns the accommodations the world’s largest hydropower system must give to the region’s signature natural resource, has now spanned nearly twenty years and five different BiOps. For his part, Judge Redden worked closely with the parties in an attempt to arrive at improvements in salmon survival. In this managerial role, he acted perhaps as the archetypical federal …

The Florida Beach Case And The Road To Judicial Takings, Michael Blumm

Michael Blumm

In Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld a state beach restoration project against landowner claims of an unconstitutional taking of the property. This result was not nearly as surprising as the fact that the Court granted certiorari on a case that turned on an obscure aspect of Florida property law: whether landowners adjacent to a beach had the right to maintain contact with the water and the right to future accretions of sand.

The Court’s curious interest in the case was piqued by the landowners’ recasting the case from the …

Present At The Creation: The 1910 Big Burn And The Formative Days Of The U.S. Forest Service, Michael Blumm

Michael Blumm

This is a book review of Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America."

Background Principles, Takings, And Libertarian Property: A Response To Professor Huffman, Michael C. Blumm, J.B. Ruhl

Michael Blumm

One of the principal, if unexpected, results of the Supreme Court's 1992 decision in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission is the rise of background principles of property and nuisance law as a categorical defense to takings claims. Our writings on the background principles defense have provoked Professor Huffman, a devoted advocate for an expanded use of regulatory takings to protect landowner development rights, to mistakenly charge us with arguing for the use of common law principles to circumvent the rule of law, Supreme Court intent, and the takings clause. Actually, ours was not a normative brief at all, but …

The Public Trust Doctrine And Private Property: The Accommodation Principle, Michael C. Blumm

Michael Blumm

The public trust doctrine is often accused of undermining property rights, when in fact the doctrine is actually a property concept, and a venerable one. Instead of threatening property rights, the doctrine functions to harmonize public and private rights in important resources, mostly those close to the land-water edge. This article demonstrates how this reconciliation takes place by examining case law recognizing the lineal and conceptual divisions by which the doctrine separates public and private rights. It also considers other ways in which the public trust doctrine balances public and private rights, such as ratifying small privatizations of public resources, …

Debunking The "Divine Conception" Myth: Environmental Law Before Nepa, Michael C. Blumm

Michael Blumm

This is a review of Karl Brooks' book, "Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945-70." Brooks challenges the standard account given in most America law school classes that has environmental law bursting onto the legal scene in the "environmental decade" of the 1970's. Like the "miracle in Philadelphia" in the summer of 1787, this "divine conception" theory of the genesis of environmental law is a myth, as Brooks ably demonstrates. He discusses the struggle to pass environmental statutes in the late 1940's like the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, as well as successful block developments like Idaho …

Enacting Libertarian Property: Oregon's Measure 37 And Its Implications, Michael Blumm

Michael Blumm

In November 2004, for the second time in four years, Oregon voters opted for a radical initiative that is transforming development rights in the state. The full implications of this substantial change in property rights have yet to be fully realized, but it’s clear that the post-2004 land use world in Oregon will be dramatically different than the previous thirty years.

Land development rights in the state were significantly curtailed by a landmark law the Oregon legislature, encouraged by pioneering Governor Tom McCall, enacted in 1973. Implementation of that law survived three separate initiatives that sought to rescind it in …