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 …

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 …