Environmental Law Commons^™

Persistent Regulations: A Detailed Assessment Of The Trump Administration's Efforts To Repeal Federal Climate Regulations, Jessica A. Wentz, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

This paper takes a critical look at what the Trump administration has actually accomplished in terms of repealing and modifying greenhouse gas emission standards and otherwise advancing its pro-fossil fuel agenda. As detailed herein and summarized in Figures 1 and 2, the scope of the efforts taken pursuant to this agenda is extremely broad – there are dozens of different deregulatory actions underway at various agencies, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But in most cases, the pace of these efforts has been quite slow. This is particularly true for efforts to repeal or revise major regulations like the …

Environmental Law, Travis M. Trimble

Scholarly Works

In 2017,1 district courts in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided three cases that clarified issues arising under the Clean Water Act (CWA). 2 The United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia preliminarily enjoined the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers from enforcing the Waters of the United States Rule (WOTUS Rule), 3 a regulatory attempt to define the term "Waters of the United States," which is a jurisdictional threshold for agencies' regulatory authority under the CWA.4 Also, the United States District Court for the Northern District of …

Environmental Protection Services And Salvage Law : Emerging Issues In Perspective, Huiru Liu

World Maritime University Ph.D. Dissertations

This dissertation primarily concerns the law and practice of salvage focusing on its environmental dimension which started to evolve since the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967, which until that time, was the biggest oil spill in maritime history. In the contemporary era of shipping, a major part of salvorial operations has shifted from property preservation to environmental protection. This dissertation centers on the services provided by salvors to prevent or mitigate damage to the environment. This phenomenon is generally referred to as "environmental salvage" which, it is submitted, is an anomaly and a misnomer. It is therefore proposed that the …

Corporations And Sustainability, Beate Sjåfjell, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

This chapter introduces the Handbook, providing an overview of its aims and structure, as well as the core research questions that the contributions to it collectively address. It discusses sustainability-related problems associated with the legal form of the corporation, and provides background on state-of-the-art research in natural sciences and other relevant fields that inform our understanding of sustainability. It concludes with specific research questions and a presentation of the Handbook’s structure.

Climate Change As A Concern In Negotiating Mine Development Agreements, Diane Desierto

Journal Articles

This panel was convened at 11:00 a.m., Friday, March 29, 2019, by its moderators, Kabir Duggal of Arnold & Porter LLP and Fr6d6ric Sourgens of Washburn University School of Law, who introduced the panelists: Poupak Bahamin of Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP; Teddy Baldwin of Steptoe & Johnson LLP; Diane Desierto of the University of Notre Dame Keough School of Global Affairs; and Tehtena Mebratu-Tsegaye of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

Overcoming Impediments To Offshore Co2 Storage: Legal Issues In The U.S. And Canada, Romany M. Webb, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Limiting future temperature increases and associated climate change requires immediate action to prevent additional carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere and to lower the existing atmospheric carbon dioxide load. This could be advanced through carbon capture and storage (CCS), which involves collecting carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released by power plants or similar facilities and injecting it into underground geologic formations, where it will remain permanently sequestered. The techniques developed for CCS can also be used to sequester carbon dioxide that has been removed from the atmosphere using direct air capture or other negative emission technologies. Past CCS …

This Is The Moment Of Truth, Ray León, Roger Lin, Camille Pannu, Irene Vasquez

Faculty Scholarship

While everyone is taking their seats, I wanted to quickly just thank the prior panelists today and bring it full circle, back to Mustafa’s opening keynote, where he asked, “Who is fighting these fights? Who is doing this work in fighting for justice?” He pointed out that many of the people fighting these fights, many of the advocates, are people who look like you and are also the same age as you. That is why we have this panel. What can you, as students, do to get involved in the environmental justice or social justice movements?

My name is Roger …

Regulating In The Face Of A Changing World: Legal Regulation Of Climate Change, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Everyone knows that the temperatures have been going up. While tern, peratures bounce around from year to year, when looking at five,year averages, the trend is unmistakable. A well,known adverse effect of these changes is that the Arctic is warming; the extent of Arctic sea ice declin, ing had dipped to a record low in 2015. A decreased level of sea ice has led to the rise of sea levels, which have increased at an accelerated pace. There are a number of projections about what the future pace of sea level rise will be, but most scientists believe it most …

Corporate Governance For Sustainability, Andrew Johnston, Jeroen Veldman, Robert G. Eccles, Simon Deakin, Jerry Davis, Marie-Laure Djelic, Katharina Pistor, Blanche Segrestin, William M. Gentry, Cynthia A. Williams, David Millon, Paddy Ireland, Beate Sjåfjell, Christopher M. Bruner, Lorraine E. Talbot, Hugh Christopher Willmott, Charlotte Villiers, Carol Liao, Bertrand Valiorgue, Jason Glynos, Todd L. Sayre, Bronwen Morgan, Rick Wartzman, Prem Sikka, Filip Gregor, David Carroll Jacobs, Roger Gill, Roger Brown, Vincenzo Bavoso, Neil Lancastle, Julie Matthaei, Scott Taylor, Ulf Larsson-Olaison, Jay Cullen, Alan J. Dignam, Thomas Wuil Joo, Ciarán O'Kelly, Con Keating, Roman Tomasic, Simon Lilley, Kevin Tennent, Keith Robson, Willy Maley, Iris H-Y Chiu, Ewan Mcgaughey, Chris Rees, Nina Boeger, Adam Leaver, Marc T. Moore, Leen Paape, Alan D. Meyer, Marcello Palazzi, Nitasha Kaul, Juan Felipe Espinosa-Cristia, Timothy Kuhn, David J. Cooper, Susanne Soederberg, Andreas Jansson, Susan Watson, Ofer Sitbon, Joan Loughrey, David Collison, Maureen Mcculloch, Navajyoti Samanta, Daniel J.H. Greenwood, Grahame F. Thompson, Andrew R. Keay, Alessia Contu, Andreas Rühmkorf, Richard Hull, Irene-Marie Esser, Nihel Chabrak

Faculty Scholarship

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in productive capabilities. The result is a ‘tragedy of the horizon’, with corporations and their shareholders failing to consider environmental, social or even their own, long-term, economic sustainability.

With less than a decade left to address the threat of climate change, and with consensus emerging that businesses need …

Annual Review Of Developments Under Seqra, Michael B. Gerrard, Edward Mctiernan

Faculty Scholarship

The courts decided 46 cases under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) in 2018. However, the most important action under SEQRA was in the Legislature, followed by the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

How Lawyers Can Help Save The Planet, Michael B. Gerrard, John C. Dernbach

Faculty Scholarship

Scientific reports, coming in a steady stream, are highlighting the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions so as to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Already, hurricanes, coastal and inland flooding, wildfires, heat waves and other extreme weather events are causing severe economic damage and loss of life, and their increasing severity has been attributed to climate change. The decades to come promise to be even worse.

Administrative States: Beyond Presidential Administration, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Presidential administration is more entrenched and expansive than ever. Most significant policymaking comes from agency action rather than legislation. Courts endorse “the presence of Presidential power” in agency decisionmaking. Scholars give up on external checks and balances and take presidential direction as a starting point. Yet presidential administration is also quite fragile. Even as the Court embraces presidential control, it has been limiting the administrative domain over which the President presides. And when Presidents drive agency action in a polarized age, their policies are not only immediately contested but also readily reversed by their successors.

States complicate each piece of …

A Softer, Simpler View Of Chevron, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Kennedy's concurrence in Pereira gives reason to hope that the Court may be finally catching on to the difficulties it created by Chevron's opening language, as distinct from its inherent reasoning. When courts quote language like "precise question" and "permissible" to limit themselves (as Justice Scalia and others unfortunately tended to reinforce by their quotations from the opinion), they stray not only from judicial function but also from the statute (APA) that instructs them how to review, and which strangely the opinion does not mention. But Chevron actually (a) independently found and defined a statutory gap within which …

Transnational Climate Law, Natasha Affolder

All Faculty Publications

Climate change leaves little on this planet untouched. The concept of transnational law is no exception. Transnational law has long functioned as a mechanism for illuminating particular legal subjects, processes, and spaces: the empty space left by existing doctrinal perspectives, the relationships between, around and outside of national laws, the importance for law of private actors and the power and powerlessness of those actors. It offers a way of opening our eyes to spheres of normativity other than the nation state and distinct ways of conceiving of the nation state itself. But climate change shatters the idea that jurisdictional borders …

Mitigating Climate Change Through Transportation And Land Use Policy, Alejandro E. Camacho, Melissa L. Kelly, Nicholas J. Marantz, Gabriel Weil

Scholarly Works

A number of U.S. state and local governments have adopted strategies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation and land development. Although some have made significant progress in reducing GHG emissions from the power sector, transportation emissions in most states continue to rise. This Article details the range of existing and proposed state interventions to reduce transportation sector GHG emissions, analyzes the trade offs of these strategies, and offers recommendations to improve and supplement such initiatives, including strategic use of planning mandates and funding and technical assistance. Additionally, regulating land use, shifting transportation spending, removing barriers to implementing road …

Legal And Non-Legal Agricultural Practices: Toward A Sustainable Future In Malaysia’S Palm Oil Industry, Hanim Kamaruddin, Harlida Abdul Wahab, Haslinda Mohd Anuar

Indonesia Law Review

As a major global producer of palm oil products, Malaysia is familiar with criticisms of its palm oil cultivation, poor agricultural practices and decisions during the planting process. Loss of biodiversity and deforestation resulting from unsustainable palm oil practices are perceived as major setbacks for the environment in Malaysia. However, at the same time as Malaysia stands committed to the palm oil industry and its contribution to job growth and poverty reduction, the relevant stakeholders are creating strategies for sustainable production. Together with relevant environmental laws to prevent and control impacts from climate change, loss of biodiversity and deforestation, environmental …

Citizen And Legal Regulation Of The Use Of Certain Categories Of Land Plots, O. Kholmuminov

Review of law sciences

The article deals with civil legal regulation of the right to use certain categories of land plots. Civil legal regulation of the right to use land basing on the experience of foreign countries has also been studied, and theoretical and practical recommendations have been given to advancing the legislation of this problem.

The Improvement Of Agrarian Legislation In A Changing Climate (By The Example Of Uzbekistan), N.K. Skripnikov, R. Kenjaev

Review of law sciences

Emphasizing the urgency of the problems associated with climate change, the authors provide the definitions of the concepts “weather” and “climate”, reveal the features of climate change for agricultural production, show both negative and positive potential consequences in this area of relations using international legal acts and analysis of the legislation of the Republic of Uzbekistan, it is proposed to make appropriate amendments to the existing agrarian and natural resource legislation in order to adapt and risk mitigation

Legal Issues Of The Allocation Of The Castle Plots For Business Activities, R. Toshboeva

Review of law sciences

the article discloses a number of negative consequences of using the land resources in the process of business activities. Author analyzed national legislation and foreign practice regarding this issue and on their basis, proposals are developed for further improvement of legislation.

Tribal Tools & Legal Levers For Halting Fossil Fuel Transport & Exports Through The Pacific Northwest, Mary Christina Wood

American Indian Law Journal

As alarming scientific predictions crystallize into the realities of today’s climate crisis, tribal communities in the Pacific Northwest find themselves on the front lines of a global assault launched by the fossil fuel industry. Encouraged by President Trump’s declaration of intent to unleash $50 trillion of America’s domestic fossil fuels, corporations push for massive expansion of the nation’s fossil fuel infrastructure—even as the world races towards irrevocable climate thresholds. The unprecedented onslaught hinges on the Pacific Northwest as a key link in a global market scheme. The coastal region sits as a proposed industrial gateway for huge export facilities transporting …