Environmental Law Commons^™

The Social Meaning Of Environmental Command And Control, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

...This essay draws on the new social norms literature to examine one of the possible reasons for the public misperceptions about the sources of the remaining environmental problems. The essay suggests that one of the insights of the social norms literature, the influence of social meaning on social norms, may shed light on these misperceptions and may enrich our understanding of the difficulties encountered by efforts to control second generation sources. In particular, this essay examines two principal social meanings that appear to have been conveyed by the command and control system. The first social meaning is the conventional notion …

Integrating Ecosystem Services Into Environmental Law: A Case Study Of Wetlands Mitigation Banking, J.B. Ruhl, R. Juge Gregg

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article argues that Section 404 of the Clean Water Act provides ample statutory authority for the Corps of Engineers and EPA to integrate ecosystem service values and impacts into wetlands impact and mitigation decisions.

Currencies And The Commodification Of Environmental Law, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The success of several environmental trading markets (ETMs) has led to proposals for broader use of ETMs in environmental and resource management policy. The successful ETMs all share a basic feature-they exchange units of trade that are fungible, such as tons of sulfur dioxide or kilos of fish. This feature of trading promotes resource allocation efficiency while advancing environmental protection. But most commodities exchanged in current and proposed ETMs, such as wetlands and endangered species habitat, exhibit nonfungibilities across the dimensions of type, time, and space. Using ETMs to trade these commodities is no longer trading "environmental apples for apples," …

The Roman Public Trust Doctrine--What Was It, And Does It Support An Atmospheric Trust?, J. B. Ruhl, Thomas A.J. Mcginn

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Through building waves of legal scholarship and litigation, a group of legal academics and practitioners is advancing a theory of the public trust doctrine styled as the "atmospheric trust." The atmospheric trust would require the federal and state governments to regulate public and private actors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to abate climate change. The traditional common law version of the American public trust doctrine requires that states owning title to lands submerged under navigable waters manage them in trust for the public to use for navigation, fishing, and commerce and that the states not alienate such resources to the …

Working Both (Positivist) Ends Toward A New (Pragmatist) Middle In Environmental Law, J.B. A. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This review of Daniel Farber's recent book Eco-pragmatism, in which he argues on behalf of taking more pragmatic approaches to the development of environmental policy, provides both the background necessary for appreciating Farber's union of ecosystem dynamics science and environmental pragmatism philosophy, and the basis for extending the new "eco-pragmatism" approach into natural resources conservation settings. Eco-pragmatism implies the intersection of two components-the eco, being the rich and developing field of ecosystem science and management, and the pragmatism, being the classical American pragmatist philosophy represented today in environmental settings through the emergence of environmental pragmatism philosophy. Unfortunately, Eco-pragmatism provides little …

Farms, Their Environmental Harms, And Environmental Laws, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Farms are one of the last uncharted frontiers of environmental regulation in the United States. Despite the substantial environmental harms they cause-habitat loss and degradation, soil erosion and sedimentation, water resources depletion, soil and water salinization, agrochemical releases, animal wastes, nonpoint source water pollution, and air pollution-environmental law has given them a virtual license to do so. When combined, the active and passive safe harbors farms enjoy in most environmental laws amount to an anti-law that finds no rational basis given the magnitude of harms farms cause. This paper comprehensively documents the environmental harms farms cause and the safe harbors …

Understanding Causation And Threshold Of Release In Cercla Liability: The Difference Between Single- And Multi-Polluter Contexts, Aaron Cooper

Vanderbilt Law Review

Toxic waste has become an increasing public health problem in America.' Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act CCERCLA" or "the Ace) in 1980, as a means to improve the efficiency of hazardous waste site cleanups. CERCLA encourages parties to clean up toxic sites by allowing those parties to recover response costs from potentially responsible parties (TRPs"). To accomplish this goal, CERCLA contains an expansive liability scheme that imposes strict liability on, among others, a party that has released or threatened release of a toxic substance that has caused or may cause the incurrence of response costs. …

Smoking Status And Public Responses To Ambiguous Scientific Risk Evidence, W. Kip Viscusi, Wesley A. Magat, Joel Huber

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Situations in which individuals receive information seldom involve scientific consensus over the level of the risk. When scientific experts disagree, people may process the information in an unpredictable manner. The original data presented here for environmental risk judgments indicate a tendency to place disproportionate weight on the high risk assessment, irrespective of its source, particularly when the experts disagree. Cigarette smokers differ in their risk information processing from nonsmokers in that they place less weight on the high risk judgment when there is a divergence in expert opinion. Consequently, they are more likely to simply average competing risk assessments.

Are Risk Regulators Rational? Evidence From Hazardous Waste Cleanup Decisions, W. Kip Viscusi, James T. Hamilton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Using original data on the cleanup of 130 hazardous waste sites, we examine the degree Superfund decisions are driven by efficiency concerns, biases in risk perceptions, and political factors. Target risk levels chosen by regulators are largely a function of political variables and risk perception biases. Regulators exhibit biases consistent with anchoring and the availability heuristic, and do not distinguish between current risks to actual residents and potential risks to hypothetically exposed populations. Quantile regressions indicate that political factors affect decisions on the cost per case of cancer averted, especially for the most inefficient cleanup efforts.

Sustainable Development: A Five-Dimensional Algorithm For Environmental Law, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article describes sustainable development as involving five dimensions: environment, economy, equity, time, and space (or scale). I suggest that the complexity inherent in balancing these five dimensions demand algorithmic approaches like those being explored in complex adaptive systems theory.

The Co-Evolution Of Sustainable Development And Environmental Justice: Cooperation, Then Competition, Then Conflict, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article explores sustainable development and environmental justice as potentially conflicting policy goals. Sustainable development includes equity as one of its five dimensions (in addition to environment, economy, time, and space), whereas environmental justice focuses principally on equity. Over time there is likely to be an increasing number of contexts in which sustainability-based policy solutions do not satisfy environmental justice advocates.

The Metrics Of Constitutional Amendments: And Why Proposed Environmental Quality Amendments Don't Measure Up, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article builds a model of federal constitutional amendments using proposed environmental quality rights amendments as a case study. I argue that environmental quality rights amendments are unworkable and violate the underpinnings of federal constitutional design.

The Seven Degrees Of Relevance: Why Should Real-World Environmental Attorneys Care Now About Sustainable Development Policy?, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article explores the evolution of the concept of "sustainable development" through what I suggest are the "seven degrees" of relevance of legal conceptualizations: (1) translation of concept into norm; (2) uncontestability of the norm; (3) intolerance of violation of the norm; (4) demand for fulfillment of the norm; (5) translation of the norm as policy goal; (6) policy consequences based on the norm; (7) translation into hard law to apply. I suggest that, at the time of the writing (1998), sustainable development was stuck on level five.

Who Needs Congress? An Agenda For Administrative Reform Of The Endangered Species Act, J.B. A. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article comprehensively examines the history and content of the numerous administrative reforms of the Endangered Species Act program carried out under the tenure of Department of the Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. The assessment is that these reforms provide a tremendous impetus for innovation of species conservation.

The Social Costs Of Punitive Damages Against Corporations In Environmental And Safety Torts, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Legal scholars and judges have long expressed concerns over the unpredictability and arbitrariness of punitive damages awards. Proposed remedies, such as restricting punitive damages to narrowly defined circumstances, have not yet met with success. This paper addresses the threshold issue of whether, on balance, punitive damages have benefits in excess of their costs. There is no evidence of a significant deterrent effect based on an original empirical analysis of a wide range of risk measures for the states with and without punitive damages. These measures included accident rates, chemical spills, medical malpractice injuries, insurance performance, and other outcomes that should …

Taming The Suburban Amoeba In The Ecosystem Age: Some Do's And Don'ts, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Urban central cities present a host of environmental problems including, but not limited to, industrial pollution, brownfields, smog, and environmental injustice. Rural and agricultural areas also experience environmental degradations such as pesticide runoff, wetlands conversion, and overgrazing. Between these different bands of lifestyle and land use lie the suburbs, which present their own set of environmental policy issues. This Article focuses on one of those problems: the growth of suburban land area and what it means for emerging notions of ecosystem management and sustainable development at the local land use scale. Part I of the Article provides the demographic and …

Alarmist Decisions With Divergent Risk Information, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Receipt of multiple sources of risk information ideally should foster sounder decisions under uncertainty. This paper’s original survey results for environmental risks suggest that the learning process is reasonable in many respects, but it does not accord with a rational Bayesian learning model. Divergent risk assessments from different sources produce extreme violations of rationality, as there is inordinate weight on the high risk assessment. This alarmist reaction holds for both government and industry information sources. This phenomenon may account for the commonly observed phenomenon of public overreaction to highly publicized risks.

Participation Run Amok: The Costs Of Mass Participation For Deliberative Agency Decisionmaking, Jim A. Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article addresses the implications of broad-based participatory reforms for administrative process, with a particular focus on how participation reveals itself in different political-theoretic models of agency governance. The first section of the Article explores participation's value to agency governance. The second section of the Article presents three models of agency governance - expertocratic, pluralist, and civic republican - and discusses participation's importance to each model. The Article then posits a distinction between ordinary and constitutive agency decision-making, and explores how participation affects each for the three distinct models of agency governance. The implications of mass participation are explored in …

The Case Of The Speluncean Polluters: Six Themes Of Environmental Law, Policy, And Ethics, J.B. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Almost as soon as it was invented in the early 1970s, the United States' modern environmental law framework has been the subject of calls for reform. Six divergent reform approaches predominate that debate today, and behind each lies strongly held policy and ethical perspectives. Using the futuristic setting Lon Fuller created in his classic study of legal theory, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers, Professor J.B. Ruhl pits those environmental law approaches against each other as society finds itself on the day of reckoning for the environment in the year 4310 AD. The discovery many centuries earlier of a remarkable …

The Benefits And Costs Of Regulatory Reforms For Superfund, W. Kip Viscusi, James T. Hamilton

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The current policy approach used in the Superfund program is a peculiar halfway house. EPA devotes substantial effort to identifying chemicals at a site and ascertaining their potential risks. It also assesses the costs of a range of remedies in considerable detail. However, many key elements are missing in the agency's analyses. There is no explicit consideration of the size of the population at risk. Risks to a single individual have the same weight as risks to a large exposed population. Actual and hypothetical exposures to chemicals receive equal weight so that risks to a person who, in the future, …

Selected Bibliography: The Reintegration Of Hong Kong Into China, Audrey E. Haroz, Jonathan R. Smith

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The reintegration of Hong Kong into the People's Republic of China (hereinafter P.R.C.) on July 1, 1997, brought together two countries, one capitalist and one communist, under one rule. As evidenced by the variety of perspectives offered at the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law's Symposium on Hong Kong's Reintegration into the P.R.C., there is much scholarly debate concerning this merger and the effect it will have on the people and politics of both countries as well as on the international community.

An earlier version of this bibliography is included in the May 1997 issue of the Journal. This bibliography has …

Thinking Of Environmental Law As A Complex Adaptive System: How To Clean Up The Environment By Making A Mess Of Environmental Law, J.B. A. Ruhl

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article is the fourth in my series of articles exploring the application of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to legal systems. It applies the model built in the three prior installments (in the Duke, Vanderbilt, and UC-Davis law reviews) to the specific context of environmental law. The work describes the subject matter of environmental law as a CAS and explains why environmental law thus must "think like a complex adaptive system" in order to accomplish its objectives.

Regulating The Regulators, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Since the 1970s, there has been a tremendous growth in government regulation pertaining to risk and the environment. These efforts have emerged quite legitimately because market processes alone cannot fully address risk-related concerns.' Without some kind of regulation or liability, for example, firms lack appropriate incentives to restrict their pollution. Similarly, when products or activities are extremely risky, if people are not cognizant of the risks they face, the firms generating the hazards may not have adequate incentives to issue warnings. To solve these problems, regulatory agencies have mounted a wide variety of efforts to improve the quality of the …

An Alternative To Ready, Fire, Aim: A New Framework To Link Environmental Targets In Environmental Law, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article begins with a brief overview of the state of the environment and the lessons learned from the early development of the command and control system. It then explores recent reform proposals and the scholarship on the democratic impact of means-based approaches. The Article next examines the new model that is emerging in the Netherlands and other countries, and identifies the critical feature of the new model: the development of context for environmental decisionmaking at each of the three levels discussed above. The Article concludes by analyzing the implications of this Framework Approach for the environmental debate and for …

Cleaning Up Superfund, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The cleanup of hazardous wastes is the number one environmental concern of the American people. The government's response: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched its Superfund program, which was established by Congress in 1980 and reformed in 1986. But, though not even two decades old, the Superfund effort is now a major target of Congress in its regulatory reform efforts. There are two main sources of dissatisfaction: First, cleanups of hazardous wastes are expensive, averaging $25.7 million per site. Superfund expenditures increased from under $400 million in 1985 to over $1.4 billion in 1995 and continue to be above the …

Deterring Irresponsible Use And Disposal Of Toxic Substances: The Case For Legislative Recognition Of Increased Risk Causes Of Action, Tamsen D. Love

Vanderbilt Law Review

Increasing risk does not ordinarily result in tort liability. For instance, every speeding driver increases the risk of a traffic accident.' Tort liability, however, attaches only if the driver actually causes an accident, This means that of two reckless drivers who engage in exactly the same risky behavior, one might face great liability, while the other might escape with no liability at all. The difference between the two cases is in many ways a mere fortuity-whether timing and circumstance conspire to cause a traffic accident in a particular case or not. Many acts of reckless driving go unanswered in tort …

Recovering Environmental Cleanup Costs Under The Resource Conservation And Recovery Act: A Potential Solution To A Persistent Problem, Randall J. Butterfield

Vanderbilt Law Review

The rise of environmental concerns in the 1950s and 1960s' led Congress to adopt a number of statutes designed to curtail the pro- duction of air and water pollution as well as to promote the proper handling, storage, and disposal of those substances capable of contaminating the nation's natural resources. Citizen suit provisions were eventually incorporated into these environmental statutes in an effort to supplement what many perceived to be less than diligent governmental enforcement measures. However, despite early congressional efforts to regulate air and water pollution, disposal of hazardous waste on land went largely unregulated. This legislative oversight resulted …

Venue For Offshore Environmental Crimes: The Seaward Limits Of The Federal Judicial Districts, M. Benjamin Cowan

Vanderbilt Law Review

Consider the following scenario: USA Oil, an American company incorporated in Delaware with its principal place of business in California, has been conducting ongoing oil drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The company operates three oil platforms off the Texas coast. One is located two miles offshore, another six miles offshore, and the third ten miles offshore.

Federal authorities receive notice that on several occasions since the company began operating these rigs, it deliberately allowed large quantities of oil to leak into the Gulf from each of them. The government seeks to indict USA Oil on three counts of …

Environmental Reform In An Era Of Political Discontent, Walter R. Burkley

Vanderbilt Law Review

When Congress sought in 1995 to restructure the federal environmental regulatory schemes, it looked like a good fight to pick.' Congress, Republican-controlled for the first time in decades, was armed with an apparent mandate to shrink the federal government. Moreover, Americans were concerned about jobs and the economy. Environmental regulation, so the argument goes, impedes competitiveness, which in turn leads to loss of jobs. In addition, if history is any guide, environmental concerns tend to suffer in times when the economic interest of individuals is the driving political force. Given these dual concerns over the economy and the size of …

What Should Be The Leading Principles Of Land Use Planning? A German Perspective, Clifford Larsen

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

In this Article discussing German land use planning, the author begins by tracing the historical emergence of land use planning in Germany. The author then evaluates the influence of Germany's constitution on the fundamental principles of land use planning. The author reviews German land use planning's historical and constitutional foundations, then examines the goals guiding federal and state planning and the system constructed to achieve these goals. The author proceeds to analyze the challenges presented to German land use planning by reunification, the environment, and European interdependence. In conclusion, the author reviews the relative merits of German land use planning …