Law Commons^™

Golden Rules For Transboundary Pollution, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental law is becoming ever more centralized. In the United States, state and local pollution laws have been eclipsed by federal regulation. In the European Community, and to a lesser degree under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), national controls have been supplemented by regional regulation. And the growing importance of treaties regulating particular aspects of the global environment has reinforced calls for more general regimes of international environmental regulation.

One inevitably given justification for this centralizing trend is that pollution is a transboundary phenomenon. Air and water pollution, and to a lesser extent groundwater contamination, can cross political …

Capture Theory And The Courts: 1967-1983, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Administrative Procedure Act ("APA") is a framework statute, not a complete code. Its central provisions are rather spare, and a number of important questions are not covered at all. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the judicial gloss on the APA has taken on a large significance over time. It should also come as no surprise that this interpretative mantle has assumed a different shape with different generations of judges. In this respect, our experience with the APA parallels that with the Constitution. Occasionally there is a feint in the direction of enforcing the "original understanding" of the …

Presidential Rulemaking, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

One of the prominent issues during the 1992 presidential campaign was abortion, in particular the federal government's role in financing counseling activities that might promote it. In the Bush Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services had adopted a controversial regulation to withhold federal funds from any family planning or other medical service that included counseling about abortion in its activities; the Clinton campaign promised to rescind that regulation if Clinton were elected President. Shortly after his election, in a prominent White House ceremony, President Clinton announced that he had directed the rescission of the prior rule and the …