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Pluralism And The Environment Revisted: The Role Of Comment Agencies In Nepa Litigation, Michael Blumm
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 Role Of The Judge In Endangered Species Act Litigation: District Judge James Redden And The Columbia Basin Salmon Saga, Michael C. Blumm, Aurora Paulsen
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 …