Law Commons^™

Analysing The Extraterritorial Application Of The National Environmental Policy Act, Browne C. Lewis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of whether, in light of Congress' actions and the judicial precedents, NEPA should be applied extraterritorially. Section One discusses the extraterritorial application of United States laws in general, the bases supporting the extraterritorial application, and the tests courts have relied upon to determine the appropriateness of extraterritorial application. The section also explores the presumption against extraterritoriality and the logic behind it.

In the second section, the paper addresses the extraterritorial application of NEPA. That sections includes an analysis of the congressional, executive and judicial treatment of the issue. The third …

Deed Restrictions And Other Institutional Controls As Tools To Encourage Brownfields Redevelopment, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, Robert A. Simons

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article concerns the use of deed restrictions and other institutional controls as tools to encourage brownfields redevelopment.

One Piece Of The Puzzle: Why State Brownfields Programs Can't Lure Businesses To The Urban Cores Without Finding The Missing Pieces, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

U.S. EPA, state legislatures, and state administrative agencies have invested considerable time and money resources to encouraging urban renewal through the redevelopment of contaminated urban properties, called brownfields. These efforts attempt to induce businesses to clean and redevelop brownfields by reducing the numerous environmental barriers to redevelopment, such as the enormous cost of clean-up and threat of immeasurable liability. In this Article, I argue that environmental barriers to redevelopment, although important, are but one piece of a complicated urban redevelopment puzzle. The other pieces, largely missing from existing efforts to encourage redevelopment of brownfields are non-environmental factors, such as size …

The Most Creative Moments In The History Of Environmental Law: "The Who's", William H. Rodgers, Jr.

Articles

My definition of creativity in environmental law is any legal initiative that advances the subject with new levels of analysis, structure, or institutional bridges. There are two requirements: improvement on function and novelty. Law is better if it increases the prospect of protecting the natural world or its inhabitants. Law is novel if it combines mandate, process, or structure in unusual ways.

There are reasons to suspect that environmental law as a field may be more creative than other legal subjects such as trust and estates, contracts, property, or tax law. One reason, as Oliver Houck has said, is that …

"The Environmental Impacts Of International Finance Corporation Lending And Proposals For Reform: A Case Study Of Conservation And Oil Development In The Guatemalan Petén", Ian A. Bowles, Amy B. Rosenfeld, Cyril F. Kormos, Conrad C.S. Reining, James D. Nations, Thomas T. Ankersen

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article presents a case study of lending by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank Group, in the oil and gas sector in Guatemala. The case study emphasizes the need for additional environmental reform at IFC. With two separate loans in 1994 and 1996, IFC supported the activities of a small international oil company that was operating within a national park in the northern Guatemalan Petdn, an area of rich tropical forests and globally important wetlands. The company's operations had been "grandfathered"in to the park upon its creation in 1990. Funding from IFC …

Environmental Ethics And Our Moral Relationship To Future Generations: Future Rights And Present Virtue, Jeffrey M. Gaba

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

A central issue in environmental ethics is characterization of our “moral relationship” to future generations. What, if any, obligations do we owe to the future? How should our present actions be influenced by their impact on the future?

The purpose of this article is to characterize and hopefully clarify certain aspects of this “moral relationship.” First, the article identifies those distinctive qualities that distinguish a moral analysis of our relationship to future generations from the moral analysis that will apply to an assessment of our actions on our own generation. It suggests that the issue of our moral relationship to …

Clearing The Air: Four Propositions About Property Rights And Environmental Protection, Daniel H. Cole

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Intermediate Sanctions: Controlling The Tax-Exempt Organization Manager, Alex Ritchie

Faculty Scholarship

On August 4, 1988, the Department of the Treasury issued proposed intermediate sanctions regulations that allow the Internal Revenue Service to impose significant excise taxes on executives of tax-exempt organizations who receive compensation in excess of reasonable compensation or in excess of amounts that would ordinarily be paid for like services by like enterprises. Exempt organization theory holds that government provides a tax exemption to further social goals, but those goals are frustrated when management has conflicting incentives. In a for-profit entity, management and firm owners have conflicting goals when control is separated from ownership, but in a tax-exempt entity, …

Ecology And The Jewish Spirit: Where Nature And The Sacred Meet, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

It's a real shame, but all political and social movements, at some point, break up into factions. The factions debate their relative necessity, claim authority over areas of discourse and action, and generally vie for power. They stop coordinating and communicating with each other. There are occasional acts of sabotage. The competition of the market economy (including the grant-funded non-profit sector) and the expanse of human vanity demand this distinction. Everyone needs to find their niche. An ecologist understands this as well as an economist, an activist as well as a lobbyist, a rabbi as well as a lawyer.

The Benefits And Risks Of Going It Alone, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Brownfield projects are essentially real estate developments with a twist, and the old real estate adage certainly applies: "Location, location, location." But if time is the fourth dimension, then time is also the fourth element in a successful brownfield project – preferably, spending as little of it as possible.

The timing of standard governmental cleanup processes is simply incompatible with many kinds of real estate projects. Forget about cleanups of National Priorities List (NPL) sites under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National Contingency Plan (NCP); those take on average almost twenty years to complete. But even many state voluntary cleanup …

How Seqra Cases Fared In 1998, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

In the annals of the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), 1998 should be remembered as the year when developers throughout New York State became frustrated with what they perceived as irrational requirements or excessive delays in the SEQRA process, went to court for redress, and almost uniformly lost. There were 18 attempts at such relief and one highly mixed success.

The Past, Present And Future Of Title Vi Of The Civil Rights Act As A Tool Of Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard, Nicholas Johnson, Peggy Shepard, Melva J. Hayden, Sheila Foster, Elizabeth Georges

Faculty Scholarship

Mr. Michael Gerrard: I am going to try to do something a little unconventional. After hearing some remarks from Professor Johnson, I will try to start a dialogue. I have been requested to ask very tough questions of our panelists, so I will do that in the hope of drawing all of you in the audience into the dialogue. First, we will hear some remarks from Professor Nicholas Johnson of Fordham University School of Law.

Beyond Backyard Environmentalism, Archon Fung, Charles F. Sabel, Bradley C. Karkkainen

Faculty Scholarship

From California habitats to Massachusetts toxics, the United States is in the midst of a fundamental reorientation of its environmental regulation, one that is as improbable as it is unremarked Minimally, the new forms of regulation promise to improve the quality of our environment At a maximum, they suggest a novel form of democracy that combines the virtues oflocalism and decentraliz.ation with the discipline of national coordination.

In substance and spirit, this new approach to regulation grows out of the tradition of backyard environmentalism. For two decades, residents of Woburn, Love Canal, and countless other communities across the country have …

Beyond Yucca Mountain: Split Liability Drives Action For Interim Nuclear Waste Storage, Amy L. Stein

UF Law Faculty Publications

After fifteen years and six billion dollars, the United States still lacks a viable long-term solution to the mounting levels of high-level nuclear waste scattered across the nation in 68 sites. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (“NWPA”) and its 1987 Amendments have driven regulators to approve Yucca Mountain, Nevada, for burial of the 37,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in need of a final resting place. In the NWPA, Congress set January 31, 1998 as the deadline by which the Department of Energy (“DOE”) was to dispose of the utilities' nuclear waste. However, litigation challenges, scientific uncertainty, and …