Law Commons^™

Economics V. Equity Ii: The European Experience, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

Lawmakers in the European Union and its member states, like their counterparts in the United States, increasingly are using economic tools to protect the environment while reducing their focus on command and control regulation. The reliance on economic approaches to environmental protection may disproportionately impact low income and minority communities. Although evidence of environmental injustice in Europe is not as strong as in the United States, several recent studies demonstrate that traditional environmental protection measures in Europe have disproportionately funneled pollution to low income communities. Economic-based environmental measures can only exacerbate that trend.

Federal Regulation Of Isolated Wetlands After Swancc, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

This past January the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Clean Water Act (CWA) did not authorize the federal government to prohibit a landfill operator from filling isolated ponds on its property merely because the ponds were used as habitat by migratory birds. The National Association of Home Builders claimed that the decision in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (SWANCC) was "a major legal victory for home builders and other private property owners." Critics of the SWANCC decision argued that it jeopardizes "perhaps a fifth of the water bodies in the United …

Private Plaintiffs, Public Rights: Article Ii And Environmental Citizen Suits, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

This Article will focus on the Take Care Clause of Article II, the most serious of the Article II challenges to the environmental citizen suit provisions. Justice Scalia and legal commentators have argued that Article II prohibits a citizen from suing to enforce federal laws unless the citizen has suffered a concrete and personal ("individuated") injury as a result of the action that he is challenging. Professor Cass Sunstein and others have dissented, and have suggested that Congress can authorize citizens to sue to enforce federal laws even when the citizens have not suffered individuated injuries.

The first Part of …