Environmental Law Commons^™

About Sdlp

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Editor's Note, Luke Trompeter, Ingrid Lesemann

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Relative Administrability, Conservatives, And Environmental Regulatory Reform, Blake Hudson

Florida Law Review

Both critics and supporters of federal environmental law have called for its reform. Conservative scholars and policy makers in particular have called for reform due to the size, scope, and cost of the federal environmental bureaucracy. To date, however, conservatives have implemented few successful alternative environmental protection policies addressing the subject matter of federal regulation. This Article argues that greater use of geographic-delineation policies at the state and local level offers an important opportunity to reduce the size, scope, and cost of the federal environmental bureaucracy, while at the same time achieving the environmental gains sought by the staunchest supporters …

Policing Federal Supremacy: Preemption And Common Law Damage Claims As A Ceiling Regulatory Floor, Sam Kalen

Florida Law Review

This Article challenges conventional accounts of whether those who drafted the 1970 Clean Air Act intended to preempt state common law claims for nuisance. Neither those who advance robustly deploying the common law to arrest air emissions nor, conversely, those who claim that common law suits would disrupt the air regulatory program appreciate the dynamic that occurred when Congress confronted the Nation’s air pollution problem and crafted the first modern U.S. environmental laws. Yet that dynamic is essential to understanding the Clean Air Act’s “citizen suit” provision and Congress’s decision to preserve certain state common law claims. This Article explains …

Shifting Between Public And Private: The Reconfiguration Of Global Environmental Regulation, Orr Karassin, Oren Perez

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Over the past two centuries, public environmental regulation (PER) has been progressively supplemented by private transnational regulation (PTR), creating a hybrid environmental governance regime. A fivecategory typology is developed to describe the ways in which international and national PER interact with private forms of environmental regulation. We then analyze the policy considerations that are relevant to the design of such hybrid regimes and various forms of interaction. Next, we describe two case studies that demonstrate the diversity of interactions between PER and PTR in a single regime. The case of sustainability reporting illustrates how public law builds on the expertise …

Keeping The Clean Water Act Cooperatively Federal—Or, Why The Clean Water Act Does Not Directly Regulate Groundwater Pollution, Damien Schiff

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

Bike Lanes, Not Cars: Mobility And The Legal Fight For Future Los Angeles, Ernesto Hernandez-Lopez

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

In 2015, the City of Los Angeles adopted the controversial Mobility Plan 2035. The Plan restructures city transportation planning by emphasizing alternatives to cars for the next twenty years. Predictably, bike lanes became its most polemic aspect. The Plan envisions dramatic increases in bike lanes throughout car-obsessed Los Angeles. This bike lane increase was challenged in court, with objectors claiming that eliminating car lanes would increase congestion and compromise air quality. These arguments are ironic, since environmental justifications typically motivate bike projects.

The Mobility Plan illustrates how law supports and challenges bike lane projects. This Article argues that although this …

Translating Legal Norms Into Quantitative Indicators: Lessons From The Global Water, Sanitation, And Hygiene Sector, Sharmila L. Murthy

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

California Rushes In—Keeping Water Instream For Fisheries Without Federal Law, Paul Stanton Kibel

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

See You In Court: Around The World In Eight Climate Change Lawsuits, Myanna Dellinger

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

“Either Secrecy, Or Legal Monopoly”: Why We Should Choose Fracking Patents, Sarah Spencer

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

Cleaner, Greener, Healthier: A Prescription For Stronger Canadian Environmental Laws And Policies By David R. Boyd, Alex D. Ketchum

The Goose

Review of David R. Boyd's Cleaner, Greener, Healthier: A Prescription for Stronger Canadian Environmental Laws and Policies.

Montana Environmental Information Center V. U.S. Office Of Surface Mining, Lowell J. Chandler

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In MEIC v. U.S. Office of Surface Mining, the cost of coal mining’s climate impacts and the agency’s NEPA review obligations are at issue. The United States District Court for the District of Montana found that the Office of Surface Mining and Enforcement failed to adequately consider the need for an EIS and to take a hard look at the indirect, cumulative, and foreseeable impacts of a proposed coal mine expansion in central Montana. In its NEPA analysis, the court concluded that if the benefits of a carbon-intensive project are quantified, then the costs to the climate should be …

Covariant Risk And Nutrient Credit Training, Brian Sawers

Maryland Law Review Online

Every summer, a dead zone is created in the Chesapeake Bay. The dead zone is created by too much of a good thing: nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorus. The largest source of excess nutrients in the Chesapeake is agriculture; manure and artificial fertilizers are washed into streams that eventually reach the bay. In the bay, nitrogen and phosphorus create an algae bloom, which consumes all the dissolved oxygen. Some fish escape, but other creatures expire in this dead sea within the Chesapeake Bay.

To reduce the excess nutrients reaching the bay, several states are experimenting with nutrient credit trading. A …

Cholera And Climate Change: Pursuing Public Health Adaptation Strategies In The Face Of Scientific Debate, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Climate change will affect the prevalence, distribution, and lethality of many diseases, from mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever to directly infectious diseases like influenza to water-borne diseases like cholera and cryptosporidia. This Article focuses on one of the current scientific debates surrounding cholera and the implications of that debate for public health-related climate change adaptation strategies.

Since the 1970s, Rita Colwell and her co-researchers have been arguing a local reservoir hypothesis for cholera, emphasizing that river, estuarine, and coastal waters often contain more dormant forms of cholera attached to copepods, a form of zooplankton. Under this hypothesis, climatically …

Assessing The Effectiveness Of The Eco-Patent Commons: A Post-Mortem Analysis, Jorge L. Contreras, Bronwyn H. Hall, Christian Helmers

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The authors revisit the effect of the “Eco-Patent Commons” (EcoPC) on the diffusion of patented environmentally friendly technologies following its discontinuation in 2016. Established in January 2008 by several large multinational companies, the not-for-profit initiative provided royalty-free access to 248 patents covering 94 “green” inventions. In previous work, Bronwyn Hall and Christian Helmers (2013) suggested that the patents pledged to the commons had the potential to encourage the diffusion of valuable environmentally friendly technologies. The updated results in this paper now show that the commons did not increase the diffusion of pledged inventions, and that the EcoPC suffered from a …

Resourcing Green Technologies Through Smart Mineral Enterprise Development: A Case Analysis Of Cobalt, Saleem Ali, Perrine Toledano, Nicolas Maennling, Nathaniel Hoffman, Lola Aganga

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement requires the world to adopt ‘green technologies’ such as renewable energies and electric transportation at an unprecedented scale. While many countries have implemented policies to spur the adoption of such technologies, a lack of focus has been placed on the sourcing of minerals that are required as inputs. As a result, there is likely to be a significant deficit that may constrain the adoption of green technologies.

In this report, we argue that a neglected area in addressing the mineral scarcity challenge is the private sector’s current trajectory for geological mineral exploration and …

The Flip Side Of Michigan V. Epa: Are Cumulative Impacts Centrally Relevant?, Sanne H. Knudsen

Utah Law Review

This Article explores the flipside of Michigan - v. EPA - where the Court’s logic can just as well support agencies in their public health and environmental protection efforts. In particular, taking Michigan as a blueprint, this Article argues that cumulative impacts are centrally relevant to environmental regulation and—like cost—deserve a systemic and meaningful role in agency decisionmaking, including in the threshold decision of when to regulate. In doing so, this Article serves as a counterbalance to the weight of cost benefit rhetoric that would reduce environmental law off to a line item in a strained budget.

Beyond The Pipeline Wars: Reforming Environmental Assessment Of Energy Transport Infrastructure, James W. Coleman

Utah Law Review

In recent years, the role of transport infrastructure in energy markets has become a flashpoint for legal conflict. On one hand, the world is experiencing an unprecedented buildout of all kinds of energy transport: oil and gas pipelines, liquefied natural gas projects, power transmission, and port facilities for coal and oil. On the other hand, environmental advocates have increasingly insisted that pipelines and other transport projects should not be built if they would encourage fossil fuel production in markets “upstream” and fossil fuel consumption in markets “downstream” of these projects.

Governments have struggled with how to respond. President Obama famously …

Guest Species: Rethinking Our Approach To Biodiversity In The Anthropocene, Karrigan Börk

Utah Law Review

Western environmental law rests on an outdated philosophy that only fully “natural” places, species, and ecosystems should receive full protection, while human influenced places, species, and ecosystems are lesser habitats not worthy of full-throated protection. As we move into the Anthropocene—a dawning geologic age marked by the emergence of humanity as the dominant force shaping the natural world—this simplistic view loses its power to guide our decisionmaking. In a world where more than 75% of ice free land shows evidence of human alteration, if anthropogenic species, places, or ecosystems are not worth protecting, then there simply is not enough left …