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Full-Text Articles in Law

Passive Takings: The State's Affirmative Duty To Protect Property, Christopher Serkin Dec 2014

Passive Takings: The State's Affirmative Duty To Protect Property, Christopher Serkin

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause is to protect property owners from the most significant costs of legal transitions. Paradigmatically, a regulatory taking involves a government action that interferes with expectations about the content of property rights. Legal change has therefore always been central to regulatory takings claims. This Article argues that it does not need to be and that governments can violate the Takings Clause by failing to act in the face of a changing world. This argument represents much more than a minor refinement of takings law because recognizing governmental liability for failing to act means …


Delinking International Environmental Law & Climate Change, Cinnamon Carlarne Oct 2014

Delinking International Environmental Law & Climate Change, Cinnamon Carlarne

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

This Article challenges the existing paradigm in international law that frames global efforts to address climate change as a problem of and for international environmental law. The most recent climate reports tell us that warming is unequivocal and that we are already experiencing the impacts of climate change at the domestic level in the United States. Against this backdrop, much has been written recently in the United States about domestic efforts to address climate change. These efforts are important, but they leave open the question of how the global community can work together to address the greatest collective action problem …


The Legacy Of Professor Joe Sax, Fred Krupp Oct 2014

The Legacy Of Professor Joe Sax, Fred Krupp

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

I grew up as the environmental movement did, in the 1960s and 1970s. In college at Yale, engineering professor Charlie Walker became my mentor and taught me that there are practical solutions for almost all environmental problems. This hopeful point of view inspired me to devote myself to the subject, first as an academic pursuit. As I neared graduation and was trying to decide on a path, Professor Walker handed me a book: Defending the Environment by Joseph Sax.1 That book was visionary in its description of private citizens’ ability to protect and defend the environment through the legal system. …


Making Ideas Matter: Remembering Joe Sax, Mark Van Putten Oct 2014

Making Ideas Matter: Remembering Joe Sax, Mark Van Putten

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Joe Sax made his ideas matter. He had consequential ideas that shaped an entire field—in his case, environmental law—both in theory and in practice. His scholarship was first rate and has enduring significance in academia, as evidenced by the fact that two of his law review articles are among the 100 most frequently cited articles of all time. Others are more competent to review the importance of his scholarship; my experience in environmental advocacy is more pertinent to evaluating his impact on environmental policymaking. Here, his ideas have had a greater impact than any other legal academic. As the New …


Joseph Sax, A Human Kaleidoscope, Zygmunt Plater Oct 2014

Joseph Sax, A Human Kaleidoscope, Zygmunt Plater

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Probably more than any other person most of us will ever have the opportunity of knowing, Joe Sax was kaleidoscopic in the way he projected his mind and lived his life as a scholar, teacher, and citizen seer. Shifting his analytical gaze from challenging context to challenging context, he repeatedly threw rich new patterns of perceptive light, thoughts broad and deep, onto a remarkable range of puzzles. Joe’s ability to think broadly and deeply influenced and reshaped the way that his students, friends, colleagues, and readers understood the intricacies, beauty, and challenges of the world around them. Others in this …


Joseph L. Sax: The Realm Of The Legal Scholar, Nina A. Mendelson Oct 2014

Joseph L. Sax: The Realm Of The Legal Scholar, Nina A. Mendelson

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

It is one of my great regrets that I never really got to know Professor Joseph Sax personally. I joined the faculty at the University of Michigan Law School well over a decade after Sax departed our halls for the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. I met him on one occasion several years ago, when he gave an engaging workshop at Michigan on governance issues around Colorado River water allocation, complete with a detailed map of the watershed. I am exceptionally fortunate, however, to occupy a chair named for him. This is not only because …


Protecting Human Health And Stewarding The Environment: An Essay Exploring Values In U.S. Environmental Protection Law, Tracy Bach Apr 2014

Protecting Human Health And Stewarding The Environment: An Essay Exploring Values In U.S. Environmental Protection Law, Tracy Bach

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The purpose of this conference is to explore “the relationship between environmental protection and public health and how it should inform our efforts to become better stewards of the environment.” No one would disagree with the assertion that during the last forty years of federal environmental protection, air and water quality have improved and led to concomitant improvements in human health. Exploring the contours of this “relationship,” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy said in her keynote speech that “[t]he thing is, the word ‘relationship’ is too neutral. The link between the health of our planet and the health …


Complex Value Choices At The Environment-Energy Interface, Hari M. Osofsky Apr 2014

Complex Value Choices At The Environment-Energy Interface, Hari M. Osofsky

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

During the 2001–02 academic year, I lived in China, teaching U.S. civil rights law and helping to start a labor law clinic. My first day of teaching the fall civil rights course was the day of the September 11 attacks, and that event and reactions to it played a dominant role in my experience of that year. However, it was also a particularly interesting year to be in China from an environmental-energy perspective because the Three Gorges Dam was in the process of being built and brought onlie. At that point, the area was partially flooded and it was one …


Paternalistic Interventions In Civil Rights And Poverty Law: A Case Study Of Environmental Justice, Anthony V. Alfieri Apr 2014

Paternalistic Interventions In Civil Rights And Poverty Law: A Case Study Of Environmental Justice, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

Low-income communities of color in Miami and in cities across the nation both share aspirations of equal justice and democratic participation and suffer the burdens of legal underrepresentation and political disenfranchisement. Such burdens become crippling when, as in Miami, local legal aid offices, public interest organizations, and bar associations lack the resources to provide meaningful private access to justice or to muster significant public engagement in the political process. These burdens become especially crippling when, again as in Miami, local and state governments adopt policies that engender inner-city neglect, economic displacement, and racial exclusion. In these circumstances, volunteer lawyers from …


Environmental Law, Public Health, And The Values Conundrum, David M. Uhlmann Apr 2014

Environmental Law, Public Health, And The Values Conundrum, David M. Uhlmann

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

In September 1996, when I was nearing the end of my sixth year as a Justice Department environmental crimes prosecutor, one of my colleagues sent me an email that there was a “good-sounding RCRA [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] knowing endangerment case developing in Idaho.” A twenty-year-old man named Scott Dominguez had collapsed inside a storage tank at an Idaho fertilizer manufacturing facility called Evergreen Resources. Mr. Dominguez could not be rescued for nearly an hour, because firefighters who responded to the scene did not know what was in the tank and what safety precautions they needed to take before …


Keynote Remarks At The University Of Michigan Environmental Law And Public Health Conference, Gina Mccarthy Apr 2014

Keynote Remarks At The University Of Michigan Environmental Law And Public Health Conference, Gina Mccarthy

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The following are the prepared remarks delivered at the University of Michigan Law School’s 2013 Environmental Law and Public Health Conference on September 26, 2013.


Human-Centered Environmental Values Versus Nature-Centric Environmental Values--Is This The Question?, Zygmunt J.B. Plater Apr 2014

Human-Centered Environmental Values Versus Nature-Centric Environmental Values--Is This The Question?, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The challenging background context for much of the discussion and cogitation in the panels and pages of this conference is the unfortunate fact that environmental protection law in virtually all its manifestations is currently faring rather poorly in the public policy arenas of national government. From the public health hazards of residual substances in consumer goods and human breast milk to the mighty troubles of human-caused climate disruption, many of the most significant structures of societal governance are locked in political and financial dysfunctions and impasses. Given the conference’s goal to “explore more deeply the relationship between environmental protection and …


Food Miles: Environmental Protection Or Veiled Protectionism?, Meredith Kolsky Lewis, Andrew D. Mitchell Jan 2014

Food Miles: Environmental Protection Or Veiled Protectionism?, Meredith Kolsky Lewis, Andrew D. Mitchell

Michigan Journal of International Law

Eat local. Such a small phrase yet such a loaded proposition. Buying food from nearby sources has become a popular objective. This aim is associated with helping farmers in one’s country or region; observing the seasonality of one’s location; eating fresher foods; striving for food security; and protecting the environment. One of the unmistakable messages of the “locavore” movement is that importing food—particularly food that comes from far away—causes environmental harm. The theory is that transporting food long distances results in the release of high levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere and is thus a dangerous contributor to …


Human Rights And The New Reality Of Climate Change: Adaptation's Limitations In Achieving Climate Justice , Zackary L. Stillings Jan 2014

Human Rights And The New Reality Of Climate Change: Adaptation's Limitations In Achieving Climate Justice , Zackary L. Stillings

Michigan Journal of International Law

In 2005, the Inuit of Canada and the United States filed a petition with the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that their respective governments had violated their human rights by failing to mitigate climate change harms. The Inuit alleged violations of several specific human rights, including the right to enjoy their culture; the right to enjoy and use the lands they have traditionally occupied; the right to use and enjoy their personal property; the right to health; the right to life, physical integrity, and security; the right to their own means of subsistence; and the right to residence …


Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime, David M. Uhlmann Jan 2014

Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime, David M. Uhlmann

Articles

Prosecutorial discretion exists throughout the criminal justice system but plays a particularly significant role for environmental crime. Congress made few distinctions under the environmental laws between acts that could result in criminal, civil, or administrative enforcement. As a result, there has been uncertainty about which environmental violations will result in criminal enforcement and persistent claims about the overcriminalization of environmental violations. To address these concerns — and to delineate an appropriate role for criminal enforcement in the environmental regulatory scheme — I have proposed that prosecutors should reserve criminal enforcement for violations that involve one or more of the following …