Environmental Law Commons^™

Revitalizing Greenhouse Gas Permitting Inside A Biden Epa, Matt Haber, Seema Kakade

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Environmental Enforceability, Seema Kakade

Faculty Scholarship

There are great expectations for a resurgence in federal environmental enforcement in a Biden-led federal government. Indeed, federal environmental enforcement suffered serious blows during the Trump Administration, particularly at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including large cuts in the budget for enforcement and reversals of key enforcement policies. Yet, while important to repair the damage, truly strengthening federal environmental enforcement will require more. This Article highlights the need for greater attention to the multiple hurdles that plague environmental enforcement. In doing so it makes three contributions to the literature. First, it asserts that even though environmental statutes, regulations, and guidance …

Protecting Third Parties In Contracts, Kishanthi Parella

Scholarly Articles

Corporations routinely impose externalities on a broad range of non-shareholders, as illustrated by several unsuccessful lawsuits against corporations involving forced labor, human trafficking, child labor, and environmental harms in global supply chains. Lack of legal accountability subsequently translates into low legal risk for corporate misconduct, which reduces the likelihood of prevention. Corporate misconduct toward non-shareholders arises from a fundamental inconsistency within contract law regarding the status of third parties: On the one hand, we know that it takes a community to contract. Contracting parties often rely on multiple third parties—not signatories to the contract—to play important roles in facilitating exchange, …

Locked Up In The Eye Of The Storm: A Case For Heightened Legal Protections For Incarcerated People During Hurricanes, Maya Habash

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Lack Of Regulation In Preventing Greenwashing Of Cosmetics In The U.S., Alexa Riccolo

Journal of Legislation

If you walked through your local grocery or beauty store today, there is no doubt that you would be bombarded with thousands of different products. You may also observe that many labels accompanying these products utilize terms such as “organic,” “natural,” or “green” in their marketing efforts. Most consumers look to these labels and trust that the products are better for their health and the environment. In a recent study, over 80% of millennials believe that purchasing ecofriendly products not only improves their quality of life, but 75% of millennials are actively looking to make greener changes in their homes …

How The Safe Drinking Water Act & The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, And Liability Act Fail Emerging Contaminants: A Per- And Polyfluoralkyl Substances (Pfas) Case Study, Carly Johnson

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Political Accountability And Judicial Review In The Context Of Climate Change Regulation, Leah Vasarhelyi

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Protecting Cultural Heritage By Recourse To International Environmental Law: Chinese Stances On Faultless State Liability, Riccardo Vecellio Segate

UC Law Environmental Journal

Several international policy documents define the environment as made of “natural heritage” and “cultural heritage” together, along the lines of concepts such as “biosphere” or “ecosystem” which have been introduced relatively recently to define the complexity of humanenvironment interactions. Nevertheless, distinguishing natural heritage from the cultural one helps analyse situations where damage inflicted to the former negatively impacts the latter. In fact, cultural heritage sits under siege worldwide due to polluting activities and environmental degradation, which are causing irreparable damage to—or even the disappearance of— valuable expressions of civilisations’ legacy. Most damages are transboundary, thereby calling into question bilateral forms …

Environmental Protection And Human Rights In The Pandemic, Sarah C. Slinger, Maria Antonia Tigre, Natalia Urzola

Faculty Publications

The Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 took the world by surprise. The virus spread quickly around the globe and death tolls were constantly on the rise at early stages of the pandemic. Although vaccine rollouts have helped halt the number of deaths, inequality in accessing vaccines and effective treatments is still a major issue. From the onset, Covid-19 negatively impacted global well-being and myriad human rights. The present report examines how environmental protection and related human rights have been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on link between environmental and human health, this report focuses on ecological human rights. The report …

The Glass Is Half Full But Contaminated: An Analysis Of The United States’ Financial Investment In The Drinking Water Infrastructure System, Maya Marshall

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

The Legal And Administrative Risks Of Climate Regulation, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

Dramatic and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) at acceptable levels. Prioritizing federal environmental regulation as the primary means of achieving these goals may be a strategic mistake. Regulatory mandates, particularly if based upon existing statutory authority, will be vulnerable to legal attack, obstruction, and delay. Climate legislation can reduce the legal risks and accelerate the rate of policy implementation, but only on the margin. Adopting regulatory controls, sector-by-sector, technology-by-technology will be immensely resource intensive for the EPA and other federal agencies. Even with authorizing legislation, federal regulatory strategies may …

“Forgotten” By The Clean Water Act: The Anacostia River’S Evolving Environmental Justice Problems, Madeleine Dwyer

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Colorado Environmental Law Journal

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Central Banks And Climate Change, Christina P. Skinner

Vanderbilt Law Review

Central banks are increasingly called upon to address climate change. Proposals for central bank action on climate change range from programs of “green” quantitative easing to increases in risk-based capital requirements meant to deter banks from lending to climate-unfriendly business. Politicians and academics alike have urged climate risk as both macroeconomic and financial stability risk. Relative to counterparts abroad, the U.S. central bank—-the Federal Reserve—-has been more measured in its response.

This Article offers a legal explanation why. It urges that, despite the substantive importance of climate change, the U.S. Federal Reserve presently has relatively limited legal authority to address …

A Right Of Ethical Consideration For Non-Human Animals, Michael Ray Harris

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

A Forgotten History: How The Asian American Workforce Cultivated Monterey County’S Agricultural Industry, Despite National Anti-Asian Rhetoric, Dominique Marangoni-Simonsen

UC Law Environmental Journal

This paper analyzes the implementation of exclusionary citizenship laws against Chinese and Japanese immigrants from 1880 to 1940. It further analyzes the application of these exclusionary mechanisms to the Asian immigrant populations in Monterey County, California. It identifies how the agricultural industry in Monterey County by-passed these exclusion laws as a result of the favored labor force of Japanese immigrants. The paper compares the acceptance of Japanese laborers to the decimation of the Chinese fishing industry in the county, which caused the eradication of Chinese culture. Finally, the paper analyzes the retroactive effects of these laws to the current Feast …

Enabling Instream Rights In The Mill Creek Zanja, Tyler Fields

UC Law Environmental Journal

The Mill Creek Zanja is a 200-year-old, twelve-mile canal cut from the banks of a nearby stream. The Zanja was built originally as an irrigation canal to serve agriculture and industry in what is now Redlands, California located just outside Los Angeles. Since the Zanja’s construction in the early 19th century, the “rights” to the waters of the Zanja have been intensely litigated, highly sought after, and heavily debated. Today, the Zanja flow is around 40,000 to 50,000 acre feet per year. The water is used primarily by the City of Redlands for drinking water and by Crafton Water Company …

The Special Purpose District Reconsidered: The Fifth Circuit’S Recent Declaration That The Edwards Aquifer Authority Is A Special Purpose District Under The Voting Rights Act, And The Tortured History That Led To That Decision, Christopher Brown

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Strategies And Techniques For Teaching Environmental Law, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

Law Faculty Books

Teaching law students is an enormous privilege and an immense responsibility. Teaching Environmental Law, in particular, gives the professor an opportunity to help future lawyers understand some important lessons. First, contrary to the belief of many first-year law students, the legal system is not made up entirely of courts. It’s not all judicial and it’s not all adversarial. The statutes Congress creates need implementation and that’s the role of agencies. Lawyers can do a world of good by working in and around legislatures and agencies and with the people who staff them. Environmental lawyers can help shape legislation, the resulting …

A Burning River: Why New Directives May Signal A Continuance In The Downfall Of The Ohio River, Vincent G. Kleindienst

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Preventing Wind Waste, K.K. Duvivier

American University Law Review

The United States has vast offshore wind resources—nearly double the total electricity consumption of the country—ideally located close to the largest population centers. This abundance has remained stubbornly untapped for over a decade, without a single commercial scale wind project built in federal waters as of early 2021.

In contrast to obstruction by the Trump administration, President Biden, in his first days in office, singled out offshore wind development as one of his priorities for tackling the climate crisis. As a result, the United States may soon see an offshore wind rush.

Onshore, the United States is a world leader …

Mega-Dams And Indigenous Human Rights, Kate E. Britt

Law Librarian Scholarship

Mega-Dams and Indigenous Human Rights (“Mega-Dams”) is a 2020 monograph by Itzchak Kornfeld. Kornfeld is a law professor with extensive experience working with governments and non-governmental organizations on the legal and geological aspects of water development, water sustainability, and sustainable development of land. Mega-Dams reflects this expertise, as well as the author's express opinions.

Adapting Federal Regulatory Approaches To Advances In Agricultural Biotechnology, Alan Sachs

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Hop On The Carbon Neutral Bandwagon: Amending The Paris Agreement To Require Short-Term Goals And Long-Term Carbon Neutral Goals For Nationally Determined Contributions, Johanna Adashek

Maryland Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.

Environmental Governance At The Edge Of Democracy, Joshua Ulan Galperin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Private environmental governance describes the affirmative efforts of private organizations to deliver public environmental goals, such as climate change mitigation, without government leadership or control. The scholarship on private environmental governance has grown quickly over its short life, but has largely described, catalogued, and quantified private environmental governance. This article begins the project of more fully theorizing private environmental governance. It is the first to explore and critique its political and democratic roles and responsibilities.

This article argues that despite the promise that private environmental governance is private and therefore “beyond politics,” it in fact calls loudly for democratic consideration. …

Governing Complexity: Integrating Science, Governance, And Law To Manage Accelerating Change In The Globalized Commons, Barbara Cosens

Articles

The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social–ecological–technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, self-organized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance involves the private and public sectors as well as formal and informal institutions, self-organized to fill governance gaps in the traditional roles of states. While new governance forms are emerging, they are not yet doing so rapidly enough to match the pace of environmental …

Actors And Law-Making In International Environmental Law, In Research Handbook On International Environmental Law (Malgosia Fitzmaurice Et Al. Eds, 2d Ed. 2021), Mark A. Drumbl, Kateřina Uhlířová

Books and Chapters

This chapter explores who makes international environmental law and which are the sources of international environmental law? Traditionally, the number of actors with international legal personality is limited. States were primary among this group, followed by international organizations. In recent years, however, considerable international environmental law effectively has been generated by non-governmental organizations, networked communities of experts, and administrative secretariats of treaty organizations. The expansion in the number of actors that, whether de jure or de facto, make international environmental law has diversified the sources of international environmental law. Sources of international law include treaties, custom, general principles of law, …

The Blm’S Duty To Incorporate Climate Science Into Permitting Practices And A Proposal For Implementing A Net Zero Requirement Into Oil And Gas Permitting, John C. Ruple, Jamie Gibbs Please, Nada Wolff Culver

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Almost one quarter of all U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions come from fossil fuels extracted from public lands, and these resources are managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). This article argues that the BLM has a statutory duty to respond to climate change, which includes the duty to avoid exacerbating climate change. The article then moves the legal discussion from aspiration to action by proposing a legal strategy, using the existing legal framework, by which the BLM can achieve net zero emissions from all new mineral development activity. While the article focuses on oil and gas development, the …

Unbecoming Adversaries: Natural Resource Federalism In Wyoming, Tara Kathleen Righetti, Robert B. Keiter, Jason Robison, Temple Stoellinger, Sam Kalen

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Wyoming’s unique cultural and physical landscape fostered dynamic federalism relationships that have oscillated between adversarial and cooperative. Too often, though, the State and its federal and tribal counterparts have found themselves in the role of unbecoming adversaries. As current and former natural resources faculty members at the University of Wyoming (UW) College of Law, we are privileged to offer a retrospective on this subject upon the law school’s centennial. In 2021, the State is facing new and daunting challenges that are straining its core industries and budget, including economic changes associated with the COVID-19 global pandemic and rapidly transforming energy …

Farming With Trees: Reforming U.S. Farm Policy To Expand Agroforestry And Mitigate Climate Change, Lingxi Chenyang, Andrew Currie, Hannah Darrin, Nathan Rosenberg

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Agroforestry systems have enormous potential to mitigate climate change. These systems incorporate trees and shrubs into agricultural production, increasing both soil carbon sequestration and the amount of carbon stored in biomass. Even the most conservative estimates find that agroforestry sequesters two to five times more carbon per acre than the most effective—and better known—climate-friendly practices for annual crops, such as no-till agriculture and cover crops. Agroforestry also offers substantial environmental and economic benefits: clean water, reduced fertilizer and pesticide use, greater resiliency, and higher profitability per acre. Yet there are significant legal and policy barriers to its expansion in the …