Environmental Law Commons^™

Judicial Federalism And The Future Of Federal Environmental Regulation, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

This article assesses the current and likely impact of the Supreme Court's federalism cases on federal environmental regulation. As a result of this assessment, the article seeks to make four points: (1) Thus far, the Supreme Court's federalism cases have had a limited impact on federal regulation, as federal courts have not used these cases as a basis for limiting the reach of federal regulatory authority. (2) Notwithstanding this limited impact, the underlying logic of the Supreme Court's cases does pose a challenge for federal regulation, particularly in the Commerce Clause context. (3) The thrust of the federalism cases makes …

A Culturally Correct Proposal To Privatize The British Columbia Salmon Fishery, D. Bruce Johnsen

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Canada now faces two looming policy crises that have come to a head in British Columbia. The first is long-term depletion of the Pacific salmon fishery by mobile commercial ocean fishermen racing to intercept salmon under the rule of capture. The second results from Canadian Supreme Court case law recognizing and affirming “the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada” under Section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. This essay shows that the economics of property rights provides a joint solution to these crises that would promote the Canadian commonwealth by way of a privatization auction …

Federal Circuit Reverses $37 Million Award To Fishing Vessel, Lance Young

Sea Grant Law Fellow Publications

No abstract provided.

Scuba Shellfishing Ban Withstands Challenge, Lance Young

Sea Grant Law Fellow Publications

No abstract provided.

The Right To Trial By Jury In Environmental Cost-Recovery And Contribution Actions: United States V. England, Jonathan L. Mayes

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

State V. Colosimo: Minnesota Anglers’ Freedom From Unreasonable Searches And Seizures Becomes “The One That Got Away”, Edwin J. Butterfoss, Joseph L. Daly

William Mitchell Law Review

This article examines the various opinions in the Colosimo case, including the opinion of the Minnesota Court of Appeals (which was reversed by the supreme court), as well as the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions of the supreme court. The article provides a brief background of how the issue of stops and inspections by conservation officers has been dealt with in other jurisdictions before turning to a critique of the Minnesota Supreme Court's decision in Colosimo, which the authors consider far too expansive. The decision in Colosimo undermines the right of citizens of Minnesota to be free from invasions of …

The Law Of Words: Standing, Environment, And Other Contested Terms, David N. Cassuto

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167 (2000), exposes fundamental incoherencies within environmental standing doctrine, even while it ostensibly makes standing easier to prove for plaintiffs in environmental citizen suits. According to Laidlaw, an environmental plaintiff needs only to show personal injury to satisfy Article III's standing requirement; she need not show that the alleged statutory violation actually harms the environment. This Article argues that Laidlaw's distinction between injury to the plaintiff and harm to the environment is nonsensical. Both the majority and dissent in Laidlaw incorrectly assume that there exists an objective …

Fish, Dams, And James Madison: Eighteenth-Century Species Protection And The Original Understanding Of The Takings Clause, John F. Hart

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Harnessing The Treaty Power In Support Of Environmental Regulation Of Activities That Don't "Substantially Affect Interstate Commerce", Katrina Fischer Kuh

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article proposes a framework for applying the treaty power that would accomplish the goal of environmental regulation. This framework would be applied where the President has signed, and Congress has ratified, a treaty and Congress has enacted domestic legislation in some way satisfying the goals or requirements of the treaty. Under this framework, the inquiry into whether the treaty power could appropriately be used by Congress in excess of its Article I, Commerce Clause powers would be indexed to the strength of (1) the contract-like nexus between the necessarily reciprocal requirements and the goals of the treaty and the …

The Effect Of The United States Supreme Court's Eleventh Amendment Jurisprudence On Clean Water Act Citizen Suits: Muddied Waters, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article focuses on the impact of the Court's Eleventh Amendment jurisprudence on citizen suits authorized under the Clean Water Act (CWA), because that law's cooperative federalism structure is typical of many other environmental laws, and because citizen suits have historically played a critical role in its implementation. The CWA's citizen suit provision (section 505), which specifically incorporates the Eleventh Amendment, has brought on citizen suits the full force and effect of the Court's current state sovereign immunity jurisprudence. The prevailing wisdom is that the Court's state sovereign immunity jurisprudence will not bar CWA citizen suits brought to enforce federal …

The Frictions Of Federalism: The Rise And Fall Of The Federal Common Law Of Interstate Nuisance, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Scholarship

Prior to the erection in the 1970s of a comprehensive federal regulatory infrastructure to protect the environment, transboundary pollution disputes frequently were adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court, exercising its original jurisdiction over disputes between states. In a series of cases commencing at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, the Court served as a national arbiter of interstate pollution disputes. This paper reviews the history of the Supreme Court's use of these cases to develop a federal common law of interstate nuisance.

The paper argues that while federal common law initially performed a zoning function by encouraging polluters to relocate …

Takings Formalism And Regulatory Formulas: Exactions And The Consequences Of Clarity, Mark Fenster

ExpressO

A vocal minority of the U.S. Supreme Court recently announced its suspicion that lower courts and state and local administrative agencies are systematically ignoring constitutional rules intended to limit, through heightened judicial review, exactions as a land use regulatory tool. Exactions are the concessions local governments require of property owners as conditions for the issuance of the entitlements that enable the intensified use of real property. In two cases decided over the past two decades, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) and Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994), the Court has established under the Takings Clause a logic and metrics …

Kootenai Tribe Of Idaho V. Veneman: The Roadless Rule: Dead End Or Never Ending Road, Kristine Meindl

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Nema V. Sorrell: It's Lights Out For The National Electrical Manufacturers Association - A Look At Nema's Failed Commerce Clause Challenge, Joshua B. Ryan

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

The Environmental Commerce Clause, Christine A. Klein

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article studies every commerce clause decision of the modem Supreme Court that involves the scope of governmental authority to regulate the use of natural resources. These decisions comprise what I will call the environmental commerce clause—the Court's interpretation of the limits mandated by the commerce clause upon federal and state legislation protecting natural resources. Overall, the Court has been limiting the scope of the affirmative commerce clause while simultaneously expanding the reach of the dormant commerce clause. As a result, both federal and state efforts to protect the natural environment have been rendered constitutionally suspect.

This study supports two …

A Retrospective On Lucas V. South Carolina Coastal Council: Public Policy Implications For The 21st Century, Kim Diana Connolly

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

A Less Tragic Commons?: Using Harvester And Processor Quotas To Address Crab Overfishing, Avi Brisman

Seattle University Law Review

Part II of this Comment provides a brief overview of the history of the Magnuson Act. Part III describes the current status of the BSAI crab fisheries and the need for crab rationalization. In Part IV, this Comment examines NPFMC's preferred alternative—the three-pie voluntary cooperative program as set forth in its Bering Sea Crab Rationalization Program Alternatives: Public Review Draft (May, 2002) and Summary of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council's Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Crab Rationalization Program Submitted to the United States Congress, August, 2002. Part V looks at the legal issues surrounding processor quotas, focusing specifically on …

The Effect Of The Supreme Court's Eleventh Amendment Jurisprudence On Environmental Citizen Suits: Gotcha!, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The current Supreme Court has substantially expanded the scope of protection from lawsuits accorded to states by the Eleventh Amendment and narrowed the exceptions to its application. As a result, many people are finding they are unable to vindicate federal rights in any court when the defendant is a state or a state agency. The most recent example of this is the Court's decision in South Carolina State Ports Authority v. Federal Maritime Commission, in which the Court extended the reach of the Eleventh Amendment to private administrative enforcement actions against states, thus forsaking completely any connection to the …

Seeing Red: Gibbs V. Babbitt, Edward A. Fitzgerald

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Federal Regulation Of Isolated Wetlands: To Be Or Not To Be, Talene Nicole Mergerian

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Federalism In Environmental Protection, Peter A. Appel

Scholarly Works

In the last seven years, the Supreme Court has decided several cases that potentially alter the balance between the states and the federal government. Although these decisions have generated much controversy, in some ways they only address some important federalism questions at the periphery. Professor Appel examines four areas of environmental law that the recent decisions either only inform or do not address at all: cleanup of hazardous waste sites; the effect of state enforcement actions on citizen enforcement brought under federal environmental laws; the effect of state enforcement actions on federal enforcement actions; and the management of federal lands …

Waste Management Holdings V. Gilmore: The Anything But Dormant Problem Of Interstate Waste, Mia Korot

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

On Revolution And Wetland Regulations, Michael J. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Incomplete Compensation For Takings, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

If a tribunal determines that a state actor has expropriated foreign investment property, or, under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that a state actor has adopted a regulation that is "tantamount to" an expropriation of foreign investment property, then that tribunal must determine the amount of compensation owed. International law has developed methods to determine the size of a compensation award when a state formally expropriates property. But the notion, reflected in Chapter 11 of NAFTA, that states may be required to pay compensation to foreign investors for what are, in effect, regulatory takings, is …

Potential Responsibility Under Cercla: Canadyne-Georgia Corp. V. Nationsbank, N.A. (South) - An Illustration Of Why We Need A Common Federal Rule Defining Owned And Operated, Timothy Holly

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

The Standing Of Citizens To Enforce Against Violations Of Environmental Statutes In The United States, Jeffrey G. Miller

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Judicial actions by private citizens have played a critical role in the development and enforcement of federal environmental law in the United States over several decades. The courts' general receptivity to the standing of private environmental plaintiffs has made that role possible. A troika of Supreme Court decisions on standing in environmental cases authored by Scalia J over the last decade had eroded that general receptivity, casting doubt on the continued vitality of private actions in developing and implementing environmental law. The Court's recent decision in Friends of the Earth Inc v Laidlaw Environmental Services halts this erosion. To explain …

Houlton Citizens' Coalition V. Town Of Houlton: Is An Open And Competitive Bidding Process Really The Solution To National Waste Disposal Problems, Jason Barocas

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Should Lucas V. South Carolina Coastal Council Protect Where The Wild Things Are? Of Beavers, Bob-O-Links, And Other Things That Go Bump In The Night, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council is one of several recent Supreme Court decisions in which the Court used the Just Compensation Clause as a "weapon of reaction" to strike down an offending land use restriction. In Lucas, the target of the Court's animus was a state law prohibiting a landowner from developing two beachfront lots. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the law as a legitimate exercise of the State's police power to protect the public from harm in the face of a takings challenge by the landowner. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the South Carolina court's talismatic …

Is The Clean Air Act Unconstitutional?, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

This Article deals with two linked questions. The first involves the future of the Clean Air Act. The particular concern is how the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") might be encouraged, with help from reviewing courts, to issue better ambient air quality standards, and in the process to shift from some of the anachronisms of 1970s environmentalism to a more fruitful approach to environmental protection. The second question involves the role of the nondelegation doctrine in American public law, a doctrine that shows unmistakable signs of revival. I will suggest that improved performance by EPA and agencies in general, operating in …

The Right To Know?: Delimiting Database Protection At The Juncture Of The Commerce Clause, The Intellectual Property Clause And The First Amendment, Malla Pollack

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.