Public Law and Legal Theory Commons^™

The Implications Of Rolling Easements And Transferred Development Rights In New Hampshire And Rhode Island, Kaitlyn E. Cox

Sea Grant Law Fellow Publications

No abstract provided.

The Implications Of Rolling Easements And Transferred Development Rights In Maine, Connecticut, And Massachusetts, Katie Zilgme

Sea Grant Law Fellow Publications

No abstract provided.

A Failure Of Conscience: How Pakistan’S Devastating Floods Compare To America’S Experience During Katrina, Oded Cedar

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Rediscovering The Transportation Frontier: Improving Sustainability In The United States Through Passenger Rail, Benjamin J. Wickizer, Andrew Snow

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Traffic Jam Equality: Evaluating The Constitutionality Of Congestion Pricing, Christopher Hudock

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Sustainable Cities Of The Future: The Behavior Change Driver, Peter Newman

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Enhancing Urban Albedo To Fight Climate Change And Save Energy, Elise Stull, Xiaopu Sun, Durwood Zaelke

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Cities And Sustainability

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

About Sdlp

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Environmental Deliberative Democracy And The Search For Administrative Legitimacy: A Legal, Positivism Approach, Michael Ray Harris

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The failure of regulatory systems over the past two decades to lessen the environment degradation associated with modern human economic output has begun to undermine the legitimacy of environmental lawmaking in the United States and around the world. Recent scholarship suggests that reversal of this trend will require a breach of the environmental administrative apparatus by democratization of a particular kind, namely the inclusion of greater public discourse within the context of regulatory decision-making. This Article examines this claim through the lens of modern legal positivism. Legal positivism provides the tools necessary to test for and identify the specfic structural …

Private Rights In Public Lands: The Chicago Lakefront, Montgomery Ward, And The Public Dedication Doctrine, Joseph D. Kearney, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

When one thinks of how the law protects public rights in open spaces, the public trust doctrine comes to mind. This is especially true in Chicago. The modem public trust doctrine was born in the landmark decision in Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, growing out of struggles over the use of land along the margin of Lake Michigan in that city. Yet Chicago's premier park – Grant Park, sitting on that land in the center of downtown Chicago – owes its existence to a different legal doctrine. This other doctrine, developed by American courts in the nineteenth century, …

Towards A Jurisprudence Of Sustainable Development In South Asia: Litigation In The Public Interest, Shyami Fernando Puvimanasinghe

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

International Law's Lessons For The Law Of The Lakes, Joseph W. Dellapenna

Working Paper Series

The eight Governors of the Great Lakes States signed a proposed new compact for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence basin on December 13, 2005, and they joined with the Premiers of Ontario and Québec in a parallel agreement on the same topic on the same day. Neither document is legally binding—the proposed new compact because it has not yet been ratified by any state nor consented to by Congress; the parallel agreement because it is not intended to be legally binding. Both documents are designed to preclude the export of water from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin apart from …

Banning Smoking In Chicago's Social Scene: Protecting Labor And Broadening Public Health Policy, 40 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1063 (2007), Adrienne Detanico

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

China-Australia Free Trade Agreement New Icing On An Old Cake-An Opportunity For Fair Trade?, Benedict Sheehy, Jackson N. Maogoto

ExpressO

The on-going challenge in economic development and globalization, particularly for developing countries, is the issue of development and equality in society. The issue becomes particularly problematic when confronted in matters of international trade. Often misnamed anti-globalization activists and pro-globalization activists fail to take note of the underlying assumptions that lead them to conflict—namely, the actual costs and benefits to society that result from their particular positions. In essence, both activists are searching for ways to improve the lives of people in the domestic context and to minimize the damage to their society and environment. China’s impressive economic record is threatened …

The Restitutionary Approach To Just Compensation, Tim Kowal

ExpressO

In the wake of the Court’s near-total refusal to impose a check on the legislature through the public use clause, this paper discusses whether any confidence in our property rights be restored through the just compensation clause in the form of restitutionary compensation, rather than the traditional, and myopic, “fair market value” standard. This paper discusses the historical presumption against restitution, elucidated through Bauman v. Ross over a century ago, is founded upon (1) the idea that the public should not be made to pay any more than necessary to effect a public project, and (2) the idea that the …

The New Nuisance: An Antidote To Wetland Loss, Sprawl, And Global Warming, Christine A. Klein

ExpressO

In 1992, Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council held that governments must provide compensation to landowners whenever regulations deprive land of all economically beneficial use, unless the restrictions inhere in background principles of the state’s law of property and nuisance. Such background principles, the Court added, may evolve in accordance with new knowledge. Thus, nuisance became “new” in two critical respects: it expanded from offense to affirmative defense, and it explicitly recognized that new learning continuously redefines the boundaries of nuisance. More than a dozen years have passed since Lucas, and much is new: The years have brought a shift …

Making Regulation Evolve: A Case Study In Maladaptive Management, Alejandro E. Camacho

ExpressO

This Article is the first cross-disciplinary, comprehensive assessment of one of the earliest regulatory reinvention programs developed to foster more participation and adaptation in decision-making—the Endangered Species Act’s Habitat Conservation Plan Program. Drawing not only from legal sources but also integrating data from recent scientific studies, interviews, surveys of government officials, newspaper investigations, and unpublished databases, this Article delves into the pioneering but defective HCP program as an example of regulatory innovation gone awry.

In the active literature on regulatory reinvention, many have pointed to the HCP program as a prototype for collaborative, experimentalist innovations in governance. Though a few …

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

When Is Two A Crowd? The Impact Of Federal Action On State Environmental Regulation, Jonathan H. Adler

ExpressO

This article seeks to identify the ways in which federal actions can influence state regulatory choices in the context of environmental policy. The federal government may directly influence state policy choices by preempting state policies or by inducing state cooperation through the use of various incentives and penalties for state action. The federal government may indirectly, and perhaps unintentionally, influence state policy choices as well. Federal policies may encourage greater state regulation by reducing the costs of initiating regulatory action or by placing issues on state policy agendas. Federal regulation may also discourage or even “crowd-out” state-level regulatory action by …

Rhode Island Court Resolves Palazzolo, Jonathan Lew

Sea Grant Law Fellow Publications

No abstract provided.

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

A Common Tragedy: Promises To Benefit The Public Interest And The Enforceability Problem, Irma S. Russell

Faculty Works

This article examines the challenge of enforcing promises made to benefit the public, using environmental commitments such as wetland restoration as a central example. It argues that while contractual promises between private parties are routinely enforced, similar promises made to the public often fail due to lack of effective enforcement mechanisms. Drawing on Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” the paper explores how individual incentives discourage both performance and enforcement of such promises. The analysis highlights the limitations of agency resources, barriers to citizen enforcement, and the inadequacy of existing legal frameworks to ensure accountability for public benefit commitments. It …

Public Agencies As Lobbyists, Jody Freeman

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Water Justice In South Africa: Natural Resources Policy At The Intersection Of Human Rights, Economics, & Political Power, Rose Francis

ExpressO

This paper analyzes water as a social justice issue in South Africa, a nation that has undergone tremendous political and legal transformations over the last fifteen years, but whose population nonetheless continues to suffer from severe inequities in access to freshwater resources. In light of growing water scarcity worldwide, this paper highlights that legal treatment of water resources has significant socioeconomic and distributive justice impacts, even in progressive constitutional democracies that have embraced principles of human rights and international legal norms. The paper explores historical changes in South African water law and evaluates the current political and legal status of …

Order Without Social Norms: How Personal Norm Activation Can Protect The Environment, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article tackles a leading problem confronting norms theorists and regulators: how can the law induce changes in behavior when the material costs to the individual outweigh the benefits and there is no close-knit community to impose sanctions for failure to change? Because private individuals and households are now surprisingly large contributors to environmental problems ranging from toxic pollution to climate change, environmental policy makers face compelling examples of these negative-payoff, loose-knit group situations. This Article suggests that internalized personal norms, rather than social norms, are the most important initial target of opportunity for influencing this kind of behavior.

Drawing …

Cost-Benefit Default Principles, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Courts should be reluctant to apply the literal terms of a statute to mandate pointless expenditures of effort. . .. Unless Congress has been extraordinarily rigid, there is likely a basis for an implication of de minimis authority to provide exemption when the burdens of regulation yield a gain of trivial or no value. It seems bizarre that a statute intended to improve human health would .. . lock the agency into looking at only one half of a substance's health effects in determining the maximum level for that substance. [I]t is only where there is "clear congressional intent to …

Liberalization And Politics Of Environmental Management In Tanzania, Alicia Bosensera Magabe

LLM Theses and Essays

This thesis examines the factors that have prevented the development of an environmental protection legal and institutional regime in Tanzania. It argues that the central focus of economic reforms has been to kick-start the economy by increasing growth through the maximization of resource exploitation. As a result, concerns for environmental sustainability have been relegated to the periphery of the development agenda. Secondly, as a result of domestic resource scarcity brought on by the economic crisis, environmental policymaking has been held hostage to the influence of foreign donors whose agendas have often been at cross-purpose to environmental protection. Thirdly, the nature …

Notions Of Equity In (International) Environmental Law: Inter-Generational Equity, Youk-Hyun Sung

LLM Theses and Essays

Equity has a long history. In the first chapter of this thesis, notions of equity in conventional international law will be discussed. It must be more helpful to understand equity based upon the history of the term since the issues relating to equity were raised in quite a few cases in the past. In the second chapter, by discussing environmental equity in the United States, the only remaining superpower and the largest economy in the world, the thesis tries to see the future of equity in international environmental law. Environmental equity issues in the United States are good sources for …