Environmental Law Commons^™

Toward Better Bubbles And Future Lives: A Progressive Response To The Conservative Agenda For Reforming Environmental Law, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bad Science, Linda Greer, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Water And Population In The American West, Denise D. Fort

Faculty Scholarship

The American West is justly famed for its sunshine and wide skies.1 However, there is a potent combination of low rainfall and growing population in the West that ensures that water, or the lack of it, will remain another well-known feature of the region. As the number of people sharing already stressed water supplies increases, the economic, ecological, and social costs of providing water become more evident. Agriculture consumes about 90% of the water that is extracted in the West, and the transfer from agricultural to municipal and industrial uses is invariably complex. Increased water extraction has resulted in the …

Environmental Compliance: Another Integrity Crisis Or Too Many Rules?, James Salzman, J.B. Ruhl, Kai-Sheng Song, Han Yu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Environmental Justice In An Era Of Devolved Collaboration , Sheila R. Foster

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental decision-making is undergoing a profound shift. Traditional forums and processes are being displaced by mechanisms emphasizing local, "place-based" decision-making. These emerging decision-making mechanisms are orchestrated through collaborative processes featuring stakeholders from both the public and private sectors. This transformation is evident in a number of recent governmental initiatives, including those by the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA"), most notably its Community-Based Environmental Protection ("CBEP") initiative. Other federal agencies, particularly those with land or species management responsibilities, have similarly advocated a greater role for local decision-makers and collaborative problem-solving. This Article examines the points of convergence and divergence between devolved collaboration …

Farmworkers As An Environmental Justice Issue: Similarities And Differences, Eileen Gauna

Faculty Scholarship

This paper endeavors to situate farmworker issues within a broader context of issues in environmental regulation. Environmental regulation is itself a subset of a broader universe of environmental justice concerns. In approaching the issue this way, the author highlights some of the similarities farmworker issues share with other regulatory environmental justice issues. The author highlights the dramatic differences as well. Leaving to others the task of describing the dire conditions of the farmworker, the author takes two important examples of regulatory mechanisms designed to protect farmworkers and describe some of the commonalities. The two sites of regulatory activity used are …

The Birth, Death, And Rebirth Of The World Trade Center And The Fate Of New York, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The year in the title has finally arrived, and in Stanley Kubrick's classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the appearance of large monoliths marks important transitions in human civilization. In New York City, the construction, destruction and possible reconstruction of the twin monoliths of the World Trade Center also mark historical transitions. Among the things transformed with each event is our relationship to the physical environment.

Giving Suckers (And Salmon) An Even Break: Klamath Basin Water And The Endangered Species Act, Reed D. Benson

Faculty Scholarship

An extreme drought hit the Klamath River Basin of southern Oregon and northern California in 2001, and a remarkable water controversy soon followed. Hundreds of farmers, who for decades had reliably received irrigation water from the federal government's Klamath Project, were told, for the first time, that they would get none that year. Instead, the government would hold the water in Upper Klamath Lake and release it to flow down the Klamath River in an effort to ensure the survival of fish protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Rice V. Cayetano: The Supreme Court Declines To Extend Federal Indian Law Principles To Native Hawaiians Sovereign Rights, Jeanette Wolfley

Faculty Scholarship

As I read and reread the Rice decision, I realized how similar it is to the trend in the recent Indian law cases decided by the Supreme Court. For example, Rice, in many respects, represents the discomfort the Justices feel for upholding "special treatment" of Native Americans under the law. The Court in Rice reversed the Ninth Circuit's decision allowing the State of Hawaii to conduct a Natives-only election of trustees to administer a trust to benefit Native Hawaiians. It found that the Fifteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War to prevent states from denying the elective franchise to former …

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 …

Lipton And Rowe's Apologia For Delaware: A Short Reply, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

Three themes animate Martin Lipton and Paul Rowe's thoughtful response to my critical evaluation of Unocal's fifteen-year history. First, they maintain that affording shareholders a primary role in the governance of takeovers depends on a commitment to the stock market's informational efficiency. Second, they claim that allowing shareholders to amend or repeal a poison pill ignores empirical evidence that the existence of a poison pill is associated with higher takeover premiums. Third, they assert that the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL) reflects an implicit mega-principle that assigns control over takeovers to managers. This short reply corrects Lipton and Rowe's …

Traits And Tools For Ethical Environmental Advocates In Florida, Brion L. Blackwelder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Escaping The Common Law's Shadow: Standing In The Light Of Laidlaw, Robert V. Percival, Joanna B. Goger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Epa At Thirty: Fairness In Environmental Protection, Eileen Gauna

Faculty Scholarship

This Article looks at how EPA is managing the fairness issue in a discrete but highly charged context: permit issuances that affect heavily impacted communities. This Article first provides a discussion of how fairness-oriented reform might evolve within the permit process. This section also examines permit issuances that were appealed to the U.S. Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) on environmental justice grounds. Proceeding one step beyond environmental law, the Article looks at how EPA is responding to claims of disparate impact under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. However, rather than focus on the intricacies of legal doctrine under Title …

A Survey Of Federal Agency Responses To President Clinton’S Executive Order Number 12898 On Environmental Justice, Eileen Gauna, Denis Binder, Colin Crawford, M. Casey Jarman, Alice Kaswan, Catherine A. O'Neill, Clifford Rechtschaffen, Bradford C. Mank, Robert R.M. Verchick

Faculty Scholarship

In an effort to address the well-documented and serious problem of environmental justice in the United States, President William J. Clinton issued Executive Order (EO) No. 128981 on February 11, 1994. The EO represented the culmination of a century of rapid changes in society's attitudes toward the placement of hazardous facilities in poor, disadvantaged, and minority communities, as well as the denial of services to these communities. This survey examines the impact of the EO on federal agencies. Environmental justice is not a problem unique to the late 20th century. Majoritarian societies have historically discriminated against minority groups.3 For example, …

Public International Law: Environmental Law, Gilbert M. Bankobeza, Susan Biniaz, Clare Breidenich, Melanne Andromecca Civic, Gabriel E. Eckstein, David Favre, Paul E. Hagen, Teresa Hobgood, Karissa Taylor Kovner, Gregory F. Maggio, Howard Mann, Darlene A. Pearson, Margaret F. Spring, Katherine E. Mills, David W. Wagner, John Barlow Weiner

Faculty Scholarship

Noteworthy international activity relating to the environment occurred in a wide variety of fora in 2000. This chapter provides brief updates on some of the most significant developments. Though by no means a comprehensive review, the chapter reflects the wide sweep of issues and large number of entities now involved in the development of international environmental law, at the start of this new century. It also reflects how critical and complex this international work is, and how much remains to be done.

Epa And Its Sisters At 30: Devolution, Revolution, Or Reform?, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Myths Of The Reinvented State, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Secondary Effects Of Environmental Justice Litigation: The Case Of West Dallas Coalition For Environmental Justice V. Epa, Gregg P. Macey, Lawrence E. Susskind

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Secondary Effects Of Environmental Justice Litigation: The Case Of West Dallas Coalition For Environmental Justice V. Epa, Gregg P. Macey, Lawrence E. Susskind

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cleaning Up The Tracks: Superfund Meets Rails-To-Trails, Clifford J. Villa

Faculty Scholarship

For more than one hundred years, railroad cars rumbled and roared along tracks in the Coeur d'Alene River Basin, serving the mining industry in the Panhandle of northern Idaho. As in many parts of the American West, the history of railroads in northern Idaho largely reflects the history of mining in the region. The first gold was discovered in this area in 1883, the same year that the area saw its first line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In 1885, the Bunker Hill mine was established near the present town of Kellogg. Four years later, the first rail line of …

Judicial Review Under Seqra: A Statistical Study, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly 2000 judicial opinions were issued under the State Environmental Quality Review Act ("SEQRA") between its enactment in 1975 and the end of 2000. Almost 700 were issued from 1990 (when the author began undertaking an annual review of SEQRA cases for the New York Law Journal) through 2000. These numbers are large enough to serve as a basis for a statistically valid review of case outcomes.

This article is divided into five parts. Part I presents statistics on the SEQRA cases. Part II reviews the history of how the Court of Appeals has decided SEQRA cases. Part III …

Chevron's Domain, Thomas W. Merrill, Kristin E. Hickman

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's decision in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Counsel, Inc. dramatically expanded the circumstances in which courts must defer to agency interpretations of statutes. The idea that deference on questions of law is sometimes required was not new. Prior to Chevron, however, courts were said to have such a duty only when Congress expressly delegates authority to an agency "to define a statutory term or prescribe a method of executing a statutory provision.^" Outside this narrow context, whether courts would defer to an agency's legal interpretation depended upon multiple factors that courts evaluated in …

Reflections On Environmental Justice, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental justice is a very hot topic. Yesterday's New York Times on the front page of the Metropolitan section had a story stating: Mid-Sized Plants Headed to Poor Areas. The story stated, "The Pataki administration acknowledges in its own study that the electric generators that it wants to install around New York City would go into poor heavily minority communities, a finding that supports some of the arguments of the project's opponents. This is quoting an unreleased environmental justice analysis that may or may not be valid, but it certainly shows how hot a topic it is. This morning …

Researching International Environmental Law, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

Question: I would like to use the Internet to research issues involving international law, specifically international environmental law. How can I access relevant information quickly if I have very little information to begin with?

Clean Air, Clean Processes? The Struggle Over Air Pollution Law In The People's Republic Of China, William P. Alford, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article commences in Part I by introducing law-making in China before reconstructing the drafting process and attendant political battles leading up to the revision of China's principal air pollution law in 1995 – which, as Ackerman and Hassler observed with reference to the United States, can be every bit as messy as the soiled air such efforts are intended to address. Part II then examines the institutional factors that ultimately are critical to an understanding of why the 1995 APPCL, as promulgated, fell well short of its original authors' objectives but set in motion a process that over time …

The Floodgates Of Strict Liability: Bursting Reservoirs And The Adoption Of Fletcher V. Rylands In The Guided Age, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Part I presents an overview of Rylands v. Fletcher and then discusses the phases of the American response: the initial acceptance; the Northeastern rejections in the 1870s, which have been the basis for the erroneous scholarly conclusions; and the overlooked tide of acceptances across the country, beginning in the late 1880s and increasing in the 1890s. Part II places this wave of acceptance in its historical context of changing social forces, although these brief sketches are not the primary emphasis of this Note. First, during a period of rapid urbanization, a small number of courts sought to protect residential areas …

The Corruption Of Civic Environmentalism, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Alden And The Web Of Environmental Law, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Hormone Replacement Therapy, Or Just Eat More Meat: The Technological Hare Vs. The Regulatory Tortoise, Leticia M. Diaz

Faculty Scholarship

Is meat with its high fat content the real culprit, or is it the FDA-approved growth hormones, the same hormones that have been rejected in Europe, that should bear the blame? Why is eating less meat associated with a lower incidence of many types of cancer? Could it be chemical overload? American women are about five times more likely to develop breast cancer than are women in less developed countries.