Environmental Law Commons^™

Stranded In The Wastelands Of Unregulated Roadway Police Powers: Can Reasonable Officers Ever Rescue Us., Keith S. Hampton

St. Mary's Law Journal

This Article describes the present state of roadway police power and explores the vulnerability of drivers and occupants to police abuse, specifically using pretextual stops. Today, state and federal courts have made many police power accommodations to the constitutional reasonableness requirement. Current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence justifies almost all conceivable police seizures of people in vehicles. If the police officer can point out any traffic law violation, he can arrest. And if he can arrest under those circumstances, then the already blurred line between detentions and arrest becomes inconsequential, constitutionally speaking. This Article proposes that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals …

Family Violence Protective Orders In Texas And Appelate Review: Are They Meant For Each Other., Manuel C. Maltos

St. Mary's Law Journal

Historically, protective orders have been viewed as an effective civil legal recourse for those affected by family violence. Title Four of the Texas Family Code governs these protective orders and sets forth the requirements for obtaining such an order. With consistent improvements to Title Four, the legislature has responded to society's decreasing tolerance of family violence. As a result, now the Family Code mandates the issuance of a protective order as provided by Title Four, regardless of whether a divorce is pending. Further legislative efforts also lengthened the maximum duration of a protective order from one year to two years. …

Legal Malpractice: When The Legal System Turns On The Lawyer Third Annual Symposium On Legal Malpractice & Professional Responsibility: Essay., Jennifer Knauth

St. Mary's Law Journal

What happens when a lawyer becomes a defendant in a legal malpractice case? Much has been written about the shortcomings of the adversary system as measured against its theoretical goals and assumptions. One significant assumption underlying the adversary system is that there is an equal playing field among litigants. The reality of a legal malpractice case is at odds with this ideal. The prevailing cultural bias against lawyers as gatekeepers and beneficiaries of the legal system permeates every aspect of a legal malpractice case. One effect of this cultural bias is the lawyer-defendant's very personal and disproportionate experience with the …

Legal Malpractice In Texas: Examining Selected Cases And Forecasting Future Trrends Third Annual Symposium On Legal Malpractice & Professional Responsibility: Symposium Presentations., Wallace B. Jefferson

St. Mary's Law Journal

Little hard data exists concerning legal malpractice in Texas. What’s more, few legal law malpractice rulings are published. To date, there are only fifty written opinions on legal malpractice from Texas intermediate appellate courts. The activity that most often gave rise to a claim of legal malpractice involved the preparation, filing, and transmittal of documents, accounting for about a quarter of all claims. In San Antonio, Chief Justice Alma Lopez of the Fourth District Court of Appeals discussed common issues she sees in her courtroom. The issues ranged from failures to follow simple court rules to more substantial failures of …

The Texas Cave Bug And The California Arroyo Toad Take On The Constitution's Commerce Clause., Daniel J. Lowenberg

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract Forthcoming.

Environmental Ethics From The Perspective Of Nepa And Catholic Social Teaching: Ecological Guidance For The 21st Century, Lucia A. Silecchia

Scholarly Articles

Over the years, a substantial body of Catholic social teaching has arisen to offer guidance as to the obligations that humanity has as stewards of creation. With ancient roots in Biblical text, and modern exploration in more recent texts, the connection between religious obligation and ecological responsibility has garnered much attention among Catholic thinkers - as well as among religious leaders of other faiths. This article explores the principles of Catholic social thought with respect to the environment and traces the development of those principles from their Biblical origins through the papacy of Pope John Paul II. In tandem with …

Ninth Circuit Affirms Water Use Restriction To Protect Fish, Lance Young

Sea Grant Law Fellow Publications

No abstract provided.

Soft Paths, Hard Choices: Environmental Lessons In The Aftermath Of California's Electric Deregulation Debacle, Steven Ferrey

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

In 2001, California's electric sector deregulation exploded, and with it the state economy and the state political structure. The Governor of California, just recently reelected was recalled by the population, and replaced with Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the physical manifestations of this crisis received media attention, there was a major legal subtext that is still playing out in the courts and will continue for a decade. With the pivotal role that electric power plays in modern American life, and the key transitional role of the legal and regulatory system in transitioning states to a restructured and less regulated format, there are …

Deliberate Extinction: Whether To Destroy The Last Smallpox Virus, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The target problem to be examined is smallpox. Specifically, what should we (the United States and the entire world) now do with the last known residual samples of the virus that causes this uniquely horrific disease? The illness itself has virtually disappeared from the catalogue of human afflictions: due to a stunningly imaginative, concerted, and resolute campaign of the World Health Organization (WHO) through the 1970s, no one has contracted this deadly impairment for twenty-five years. Yet the causative element, an insidious scourge known as the variola virus, still remains, housed for now in high-security freezers at the U.S. Centers …

Aquaculture And Pollutants Under The Clean Water Act: A Case For Regulation, Sean M. Helle

Publications

No abstract provided.

Water Wrongs: Why Can’T We Get It Right The First Time?, David Getches

Publications

No abstract provided.

Settling The Wilderness, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

No abstract provided.

International Environmental Law: 2004 Annual Report, Vail T. Thorne, Lakshman Guruswamy, Kevin L. Doran

Publications

No abstract provided.

Preemption Of Common Law Claims And The Prospects For Fifra: Justice Stevens Puts The Genie Back In The Bottle, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Publications

In the upcoming Term, the Supreme Court will consider a case raising the question whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state tort law, or only state positive law. FIFRA, under which the Environmental Protection Agency regulates pesticide labels, has an express preemption clause and clearly preempts state positive law on labeling. The question presented is whether and to what extent it also preempts state tort law, particularly claims for failure to warn. The Court's precedent on preemption of state tort law is erratic, but for some reason, the pro-preemption view has been much more popular with lower …

Conservation Through Collusion: Antitrust As An Obstacle To Marine Resource Conservation, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

Although it is not a new environmental problem, overfishing is arguably one of the most serious environmental problems today. Despite decades of government regulation, fisheries are in trouble the world over.

With little doubt, the federal fishery regulations adopted in the last twenty-five years have failed to ensure sustainable utilization of U.S. fisheries. The existing regulatory framework is "a failed experiment that has led to the destruction of United States coastal fisheries." At the same time that the federal government adopted an elaborate regulatory structure, federal law has impeded the development of cooperative fishery management institutions that may have helped …

Supplemental Environmental Projects Have Been Effectively Used In Citizen Suits To Deter Future Violations As Well As To Achieve Significant Additional Environmental Benefits, Edward Lloyd

Faculty Scholarship

Supplemental Environmental Projects (SUPs) are environmentally benefical projects included in settlements of environmental law enforcement cases. Courts have addressed SEPs in two contexts: where proposed by parties in consent decrees and where courts have fashioned SEPs as apart of the relief ordered in an enforcement case. SEPs have been extensively used in both government and citizen enforcement cases despite the nearly universal absence of any explicit legislative authorization by Congress. Congress has tangentially recognized the place of SEPs in the penalty and deterrence scheme by giving the Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Attorney General …

Improving Laws, Declining World: The Tort Of Contamination, William H. Rodgers, Jr.

Articles

This article considers nature's "baseline" through the lens of modern environmental laws. We measure this "baseline" like never before and are proud of our databases on fish advisories, beach closures, and impaired water bodies, to mention a few. The ubiquitous legal response to these measures of environmental decline is the public warning "Don't Eat the Fish" and "Don't Drink the Water."

This article assesses the function, utility, and purpose of these public warnings and finds them wanting. Their principal value is that they serve as measures of lost natural capital and harbingers of shifting baselines.

Our descriptive journey leaves us …

Cost-Benefit Analysis, Static Efficiency And The Goals Of Environmental Law, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Private Property And The Politics Of Environmental Protection, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Private property plays two opposing roles in stories about the environment. In the story favored by most environmentalists, private property is the bad guy. It balkanizes an interconnected ecosystem into artificial units of individual ownership. Owners of these finite parcels have little incentive to invest in ecosystem resources and every incentive to dump polluting wastes onto other parcels. Only by relocating control over natural resources in some central authority like the federal government, can we make integrated decisions designed to preserve the health of the entire ecosystem. For these traditional environmentalists, private property is the problem; public control is the …