Law Commons^™

The Commerce Clause Meets The Delhi Sands Flower-Loving Fly, John C. Nagle

Journal Articles

Is the Endangered Species Act constitutional? The D.C. Circuit considered that question in National Association of Home Builders v. Babbitt in 1997. More specifically, the case considered whether the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce authorized the ESA's prohibition upon building a large regional hospital in the habitat of an endangered fly that lives only in a small area of southern California. The three judges on the D.C. Circuit approached the question from three different perspectives: the relationship between biodiversity as a whole and interstate commerce, the relationship between the fly and interstate commerce, and the relationship between the hospital …

Commerce Clause, First Department: R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company V. City Of New York Department Of Finance

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Destination Unknown: Does The Internet's Lack Of Physical Situs Preclude State And Federal Attempts To Regulate It , Christopher S.W. Blake

Cleveland State Law Review

This Note summarizes recent tests of state and federal Internet content regulations and analyzes the impact the Internet's incompatibility with "real space" geography had or might have had on the courts' reasoning. To some extent, it posits what problems the incompatibility poses for impending legislation. In the midst of such discussion, this Note opines that state and federal regulations of the Internet could conceivably both fail Constitutional muster, due specifically to the internet's physical shortcomings. Part II of this Note offers a background of the Internet's different communication capacities and describes its conflicts with geography. Part III summarizes the courts' …

Emerging Statutory And Constitutional Tools For States To Resist Federal Environmental Regulation, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

This is a time of high tensions between the federal government and the states over environmental regulation. The flashpoints include actions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) against states that enact laws shielding environmental audit reports from discovery; the withdrawal of several states from certain regulatory reform programs and delegated programs; and EPA accusations that some states are ignoring many violations of the pollution control laws, and loud denials by state representatives.

The Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the complex of federal environmental statutes enacted in the 1970s and 1980s still give Washington the upper hand in …