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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 …