Law Commons^™

Regulatory Accounting: Costs And Benefits Of Federal Regulations: Testimony Before The H. Subcomm. On Energy Policy, Natural Resources, And Regulatory Affairs, Of The H. Comm. On Government Reform, Hearing On Regulatory Accounting, 107th Cong., Mar. 12, 2002 (Statement Of Lisa Heinzerling, Prof. Of Law, Geo. U. L. Center), Lisa Heinzerling

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

The Humbugs Of The Anti-Regulatory Movement, Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is so hard to get beyond cynicism these days. Even a symposium devoted to this goal has, as reflected in the articles by Professors Cynthia Farina, Jeffrey Rachlinski, and Mark Seidenfeld, succeeded primarily in suggesting that regulators are not so much selfish as they are obtuse, stubborn, and sometimes downright dumb. Undoubtedly this is true some of the time. But Farina, Rachlinski, and Seidenfeld want to convince us that it is true enough of the time to warrant quite large-scale solutions. In this Comment, we take issue with this pessimistic assessment of regulatory behavior by discrediting the most prominent …

Environmental Law And The Supreme Court: Three Years Later, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In my Garrison Lecture three years ago, I surveyed the environmental law decisions of the Supreme Court between 1970 and 1999. I commented on which Justices had been more or less influential in shaping the Court's decisions and, even more provocatively (if not foolishly), sought to "score" the individual Justices on their responsiveness to environmental protection concerns based on their votes cast in a subset of those cases. The broader thesis of the lecture, however, was that there is something distinctively "environmental" about environmental law and that the Court's increasing inability to appreciate that dimension was leading to more poorly-reasoned …

Listing And Delisting Processes Under The Endangered Species Act: Hearing Before The S. Subcomm. On Fisheries, Wildlife And Water, 107th Cong., May 9, 2001 (Statement Of John D. Echeverria, Dir. Environmental Policy Project, Geo. U. L. Center), John D. Echeverria

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

The Clean Air Act And The Constitution, Lisa Heinzerling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the summer of 1997, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) strengthened the air quality standards for two air pollutants, particulate matter and ozone, based on mounting scientific evidence of the harmfulness of these pollutants at levels allowed by the existing standards. With respect to particulate matter (PM), the agency found that numerous epidemiological studies had established an association between PM levels and premature deaths in humans, especially in the elderly population. Indeed, one study on which the EPA relied had found that approximately 60,000 premature deaths in the United States alone could be attributed, annually, to particulate matter. The scientific …

The Greening Of America And The Graying Of United States Environmental Law: Reflections On Environmental Law’S First Three Decades In The United States, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this article is to begin to place the developments of the past few decades in historical perspective. To that end, the article is divided into three parts, roughly corresponding to the final three decades of the past century. The first part of the article describes the origins of U.S. environmental law, focusing primarily on its first decade from 1970 through 1980. The second part examines how U.S. environmental laws have since evolved, focusing primarily on their second decade (the 1980s), which was a period of tremendous expansion for environmental law. Finally, the third part considers future trends …

Tortious Toxics, Lisa Heinzerling, Cameron Powers Hoffman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Article we offer one small idea with potentially large implications. We propose the recognition arid development of a special tort for toxic exposures, where the exposures have not yet led to a physical illness such as cancer. We argue, in brief, that this new tort would, in one simple step, accomplish three things: it would address many of the problems with the courts' current handling of toxic torts; it would consolidate the many overlapping causes of action now pressed in toxic tort cases into one single claim; and it would give expression to the real injury motivating these …

Highways And Bi-Ways For Environmental Justice, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the past, present, and future of the environmental justice movement as illustrated by the highway between Selma and Montgomery in Alabama and the highway system surrounding the City of Atlanta in neighboring Georgia. The essay is divided into three parts. The first part describes environmental justice, seeking both to place it in a broader historical perspective and to discuss how it relates to civil rights law and environmental law. The second part undertakes a closer examination of the challenges presented by efforts to fashion positive law to address environmental justice norms. This …

Brief For Respondents Massachusetts And New Jersey, American Trucking Associations, Inc. V. Browner, Nos. 99-1257 & 99-1426 (U.S. Sep. 11, 2000), Lisa Heinzerling, Richard J. Lazarus

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Thirty Years Of Environmental Protection Law In The Supreme Court, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Lectures and Appearances

It is an honor to present a lecture named after Lloyd Garrison and to be here at Pace Law School. It is especially fitting, of course, that the first Garrison Lecture was presented by Pace's own David Sive. Professor Sive, as we all know, worked closely with Garrison on the celebrated Scenic Hudson litigation. Few legal counsel have been so closely identified with the emergence of the environmental law profession during the past three decades. Indeed, if there were such a thing as a legal thesaurus that linked substantive areas of law with lawyers and one looked up "environ-mental law," …

Should Lucas V. South Carolina Coastal Council Protect Where The Wild Things Are? Of Beavers, Bob-O-Links, And Other Things That Go Bump In The Night, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council is one of several recent Supreme Court decisions in which the Court used the Just Compensation Clause as a "weapon of reaction" to strike down an offending land use restriction. In Lucas, the target of the Court's animus was a state law prohibiting a landowner from developing two beachfront lots. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the law as a legitimate exercise of the State's police power to protect the public from harm in the face of a takings challenge by the landowner. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the South Carolina court's talismatic …

Restoring What’S Environmental About Environmental Law In The Supreme Court, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Article, Professor Richard Lazarus examines the votes of the individual Justices who have decided environmental law cases before the United States Supreme Court during the past three decades. The Article reports on a number of interesting statistics regarding the identity of those Justices who have most influenced the Court's environmental law jurisprudence and the sometimes curious patterns in voting exhibited by individual Justices. Lazarus's thesis is that the Supreme Court's apparent apathy or even antipathy towards environmental law during that time results from the Justices' failure to appreciate environmental law as a distinct area of law. The Justices …

A Greener Shade Of Crimson: Law And The Environment Alumni Forum, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

With the few minutes that I have, I want to respond to or elaborate on some of what was said and speak more directly about the development of the Environmental Law Program. Then I cannot resist commenting on some things which have not been said, but should be . . . In developing a program, one does not need to have gobs and gobs of environmental law courses. You need a core set of courses. You need a minimum of four courses - a minimum - taught by permanent faculty. You need an environmental law survey class. You need a …

“Environmental Racism! That’S What It Is.”, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this essay, Professor Lazarus discusses former NAACP director the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis's characterization of U.S. environmental policy as "environmental racism." He first justifies this provocative topic choice and then suggests that Chavis's allegation has transformed environmental law. Professor Lazarus next discusses the details of this transformation, arguing that Rev. Chavis has essentially reshaped the way environmental law and justice are conceived. He offers examples of various environmental programs and social and political effects traceable to Chavis's environmental racism comment. Finally, the conclusion provides some of the author's ruminations about the future of environmental law and policy.

The Original Understanding Of The Takings Clause, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Environmental Law & Policy Institute Papers & Reports

The champions of the property rights movement claim that they are fighting to restore the original understanding of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. They invoke James Madison and other founding fathers as support for proposed statutes that require the federal government to pay property owners when it prevents them from harming the environment or jeopardizing the survival of endangered species. Wetlands regulation, it is often said, "takes" property by diminishing its value, and the founders adopted the Takings Clause to ensure that, when government regulations diminished the value of property, the owner would receive compensation. Increasing numbers of …

How Do We Get Rid Of These Things? Dismantling Excess Weapons While Protecting The Environment, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The startling successes of contemporary international arms control negotiations call to mind the old aphorism that one should be careful about what one wishes for, because the wish just might come true.

Today, disarmament diplomacy has wrought unprecedented triumphs across a wide range of global bargaining issues, producing a series of watershed treaties that offer spectacular new advantages for the security of the United States and for the prospect of enduring world peace. At the same time, however, these unanticipated negotiation breakthroughs have themselves generated unforeseen implementation problems, spawning a host of novel difficulties for which the traditional tools and …

Has The U.S. Supreme Court Finally Drained The Swamp Of Takings Jurisprudence? The Impact Of Lucas V. South Carolina Coastal Council On Wetlands And Coastal Barrier Beaches, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article argues that the Court's reliance on the law of property neither creates an internal inconsistency in takings law nor necessarily leads to further destruction of natural resources. Background principles of property law, such as custom and public trust, have long provided a basis for government protection of the public's interest in certain types of land, like the barrier beach David Lucas sought to develop.

Thus, the Lucas case need not be perceived as casting a constitutional cloud over laws protecting important ecosystems like wetlands and barrier beaches. The decision may not place these resources in greater danger from …

Environmental Justice Clinics: Visible Models Of Justice, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines and evaluates the contributions of environmental justice law clinics to pedagogy, law reform and legal services. The author bases her observations and conclusions on her experiences at Georgetown University Law Center where she teaches a course in environmental equity and supervises students in an environmental justice clinic.

Part II summarizes current knowledge about the incidences and causes of environmental inequity and the legal barriers to achieving environmental justice. This discussion highlights the distinctive aspects of environmental justice issues which influence the design of environmental justice clinical programs. Part III presents general information on legal clinical programs and …

Pursuing "Environmental Justice": The Distributional Effects Of Environmental Protection, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The purpose of this Article is to explore the distributional side of environmental protection and, more particularly, to explain the significance of including environmental justice concerns into the fashioning of environmental protection policy. Unlike earlier legal commentary, hazardous waste facility siting is not this Article's dominant focus. It offers a broader, more systemic, examination of environmental protection laws and policies. The Article is divided into three parts. First, it describes the nature of the problem. This includes a discussion of the varied distributional implications of environmental protection laws, as well as the ways in which racial minorities could receive too …

Putting The Correct "Spin" On Lucas, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Part I describes and discusses the significance of the Lucas majority's desire to draft an opinion making environmental regulations more susceptible to takings challenges. Part II identifies the majority's antiquated notions of the physical and social function of real property as the source of the majority's misguided efforts. Finally, Part III describes how the majority's analytical framework may ultimately make it easier, rather than harder, for environmental protection measures to survive takings challenges.

International Environmental Law: Contemporary Issues And The Emergence Of A New World Order, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 1972 international environmental law was a fledgling field with less than three dozen multilateral agreements. Today international environmental law is arguably setting the pace for cooperation in the international community in the development of international law. There are nearly nine hundred international legal instruments that are either primarily directed to international environmental issues or contain important provisions on them. This proliferation of legal instruments is likely to continue. Therefore, it is important to assess what we have done and explore where we are headed.

Environment And Trade As Partners In Sustainable Development: A Commentary, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Trade is not an end in itself; rather, it is a means to an end. The end is environmentally sustainable economic development. So viewed, there are legitimate constraints on trading patterns and practices that are necessary to ensure that the "instrument of trade" leads to environmentally sustainable development. Measures needed to protect the environment cannot be forsworn simply because they may adversely affect free trading relationships.

Federal Wetlands Regulatory Policy: Up To Its Ears In Alligators, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Protecting the nation's dwindling wetland resources under section 404 of the Clean Water Act has been a persistent and discouraging proposition. Section 404 of the Act "lies like an open wound across the body of environmental law." Given the ecological and economic value of the resource, this seems puzzling--but only for a moment. An examination of the federal wetlands permitting program reveals significant problems. These problems, combined with ingrained attitudes about the sanctity of private property, lack of public appreciation of wetland values, and insufficient political will to protect them, make it easy to see why wetlands continue to disappear, …

The Tragedy Of Distrust In The Implementation Of Federal Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The need to reduce dramatically the strain we place on the natural environment is simultaneously immediate and long-term. Our domestic laws reflect that understanding and express a symbolic commitment to that goal. Those laws have achieved, moreover, significant improvement in discrete areas and, in some others, have managed to resist further environmental degradation in the face of a growing economy. For that reason, they warrant great praise. The past twenty years nevertheless reveal that those same laws decline to undertake the concomitant modification of our governmental institutions, and the way we think about them, which is necessary for a fuller …

Green Property, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay begins an effort to imagine legal principles that further ecological values and to criticize extant principles that embody the antithetical values of exploitation and consumption. I will focus on the transformation of property law inherent in adopting an environmentally sustainable land use program.

Our Rights And Obligations To Future Generations For The Environment, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We read every day about the desecration of our environment and the mismanagement of our natural resources. We have always had the capacity to wreck the environment on a small or even regional scale. Centuries of irrigation without adequate drainage in ancient times converted large areas of the fertile Tigris-Euphrates valley into barren desert. What is new is that we now have the power to change our global environment irreversibly, with profoundly damaging effects on the robustness and integrity of the planet and the heritage that we pass to future generations.

The Planetary Trust: Conservation And Intergenerational Equity, Edith Brown Weiss

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article suggests a normative framework which, if adopted and internalized by our political, economic, and social institutions, might enable them to serve as vehicles for ensuring that future generations will inherit their just share of our global heritage. Its thesis is that the human species holds the natural and cultural resources of the planet in trust for all generations of the human species. The article focuses on our duty towards the human species, for it is on this fiduciary duty that law and political institutions can be brought most readily to bear. This planetary trust obligates each generation to …