Law Commons^™

Whither Rationality?, Shi-Ling Hsu

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health. By Michael A. Livermore and Richard L. Revesz.

Dismantling The Wall, Charles Shane Ellison, Anjum Gupta

Michigan Law Review Online

In this Essay, we will summarize the status quo of this crisis. We will highlight warning signs that began to appear even before the Trump Administration to understand how we reached this point. We will then propose solutions to chart a pathway forward, exploring strategies for implementing lasting reforms aimed at tearing down this administrative wall and replacing it with a more fair and welcoming system.

Evaporating Into Thin Air: The Prosecution Of Air Pollution Crimes During The Trump Administration, Joshua Ozymy, Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Antagonistic to environmental regulation, the Trump Administration sought to significantly roll back federal clean air law enforcement. Yet, we know very little about the impact of the Administration on air pollution criminal enforcement. Through content analysis of all EPA criminal investigations leading to prosecution, we analyze patterns in charging and sentencing and draw out the broader themes in air pollution prosecutions during this period. Our results show a sizable drop in prosecutions compared to the Obama Administration. Although prosecutors managed to pursue serious crimes involving significant harm and criminal conduct and secure over $2.9 billion in monetary penalties, roughly 160 …

Structured To Fail: Lessons From The Trump Administration’S Faulty Pandemic Planning And Response, Alejandro E. Camacho, Robert L. Glicksman

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The Trump Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder that poorly designed government can be a matter of life and death. This article explains how the Administration’s careless and delayed response to the crisis was made immeasurably worse by its confused and confusing reallocation of authority to perform or supervise tasks essential to reducing the virus’s ravages.

After exploring the rationale for and impact of prior federal reorganizations responding to public health crises, the article shows how a combination of unnecessary and unhelpful overlapping authority and a thoughtless mix of centralized and decentralized authority contributed to the …

Back To The Future: Creating A Bipartisan Environmental Movement For The 21st Century, David M. Uhlmann

Articles

With a contentious presidential election looming amidst a pandemic, economic worries, and historic protests against systemic racism, climate action may seem less pressing than other challenges. Nothing could be further from the truth. To prevent greater public health threats and economic dislocation from climate disruption, which will disproportionately harm Black Americans, people of color, and indigenous people, this Comment argues that we need to restore the bipartisanship that fueled the environmental movement and that the fate of the planet—and our children and grandchildren—depends upon our collective action.

What A Difference A State Makes: California’S Authority To Regulate Motor Vehicle Emissions Under The Clean Air Act And The Future Of State Autonomy, Chiara Pappalardo

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Air pollutants from motor vehicles constitute one of the leading sources of local and global air degradation with serious consequences for human health and the overall stability of Earth’s climate. Under the Clean Air Act (“CAA”), for over fifty years, the state of California has served as a national “laboratory” for the testing of technological solutions and regulatory approaches to improve air quality. On September 19, 2019, the Trump Administration revoked California’s authority to set more stringent pollution emission standards. The revocation of California’s authority frustrates ambitious initiatives undertaken in California and in other states to reduce local air pollution …

Searching For Humanitarian Discretion In Immigration Enforcement: Reflections On A Year As An Immigration Attorney In The Trump Era, Nina Rabin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article describes one of the most striking features of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy: the shift in the way discretion operates in the legal immigration system. Unlike other high-profile immigration policies that have been the focus of class action lawsuits and public outcry, the changes to the role of discretion have attracted little attention, in part because they are implemented through low-visibility individualized decisions that are difficult to identify, let alone challenge systemically. After providing historical context regarding the role of discretion in the immigration system before the Trump Administration, I offer four case studies from my immigration practice …

Environmental Health Regulation In The Trump Era: How President Trump’S Two-For-One Regulatory Plan Impacts Environmental Regulation, Elizabeth Ann Glass Geltman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article explores the Trump regulatory reform agenda and its potential impact on environmental determinants of health. The Article begins with a discussion of the Department of Commerce’s (DOC or Commerce) initial fact-finding investigation to evaluate the impact of federal regulations on domestic manufacturing. The Article next presents an overview of the Trump administration’s regulatory reform formula as announced in E.O. 13771 and the interim guidance explaining E.O. 13771 and E.O. 13777 (the executive order announcing the Trump administration’s plans to enforce the regulatory reform plan announced in E.O. 13771). The Article then examines the federal agency initiatives undertaken in …