Environmental Law Commons^™

Senator Edmund Muskie's Enduring Legacy In The Courts, Richard J. Lazarus

Maine Law Review

More than any other legislator in the nation’s history, Senator Ed Muskie is environmental law’s champion. Over forty years ago, Muskie helped secure passage of an extraordinary series of ambitious and demanding air and water pollution control laws that sought no less than to redefine the relationship of humankind here in the United States to our natural environment. The upshot has been the nation’s enjoyment, for more than four decades, of enormous economic growth without the kind of accompanying environmental destruction witnessed during the same time period in the nations lacking such controls. While President Richard Nixon is properly credited …

Edmund S. Muskie: A Man With A Vision, Leon G. Billings

Maine Law Review

At Senator Muskie’s funeral I noted that I had been on his staff for fifteen years, but had worked for him for thirty. In a way I am still working for him, or at lease, because of him. This fall my colleague and minority counsel, Tom Jorling, and I are team-teaching a course entitled “Origins of Environmental Law” at Columbia University. Preparing for that course, reading old memos to the Senator, re-reading his floor statements, interrogatories, and speeches and going back to the transcripts of Subcommittee discussion has been revealing, inspiring, and refreshing. I am not sure that, at the …

Edmund S. Muskie: The Environmental Leader And Champion, Joel K. Goldstein

Maine Law Review

Leon Billings has referred to Edmund S. Muskie as America’s “most important environmental leader”1 and Richard Lazarus has called him “environmental law’s champion.”2 Indeed he was. Their essay in this volume make evident Muskie’s enormous and enduring legacy in shaping the environmental laws that have protected health and life for more than forty years and the remarkable extent to which executive agencies and courts continue to look and rely upon the work he did roughly four decades ago. To the extent there are inadequacies in the regulatory regime, Muskie cannot fairly be blamed. He left Congress more than thirty-five years …

Nepa, Flpma, And Impact Reduction: An Empirical Assessment Of Blm Resource Management Planning In The Mountain West, John C. Ruple, Mark Capone

Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment publications

This Article reviews Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) completed in conjunction with Resource Management Plan (RMP) revisions conducted by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming between 2004 and 2014. Based on our review of sixteen EISs, we found that RMP revisions increased application of more protective surface use stipulations by statistically significant amounts without causing a statistically significant change in either the number of jobs created or the pace of oil and gas development. In fact, both the number of jobs created and wells drilled increased slightly despite strengthened environmental protections. We also found that …

Nepa And The Energy Policy Act Of 2005 Statutory Categorical Exclusions: What Are The Environmental Costs Of Expedited Oil And Gas Development?, Mark Capone, John C. Ruple

Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment publications

A decade ago, concerned that National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) compliance caused delays in permitting oil and gas (“O&G”) development on federal land, Congress enacted Section 390 of the Energy Policy Act (“EPAct”) of 2005. Section 390 is intended to expedite the environmental review of O&G development projects on federal lands. To effectuate that end Congress created several statutory categorical exclusions (“CEs”) to NEPA that apply to O&G development. Prior to the EPAct, the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) would permit new O&G development after conducting an Environmental Impact Statement (“EIS”) or Environmental Assessment (“EA”). EISs and EAs were the …

Governance Interactions In Sustainable Supply Chain Management, Errol Meidinger

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

“Supply chains” are a major site of transnational business governance, and yet their dynamics and effectiveness are usually more assumed than interrogated in regulatory governance discourse. The very term “chain” implies a more determinist and simplistic understanding of supply relationships than is empirically supportable. Supply chains in practice are complex, dynamic, and highly variable networks. Based on peer-group presentations by over 60 supply chain professionals, this paper analyzes sustainable supply chain management practices in terms of the interactions conceptions of the Transnational Business Governance Interactions framework. It discusses possible refinements of the framework and suggests that sustainable supply chain management …

Home Rule In An Era Of Local Environmental Innovation, Sarah J. Fox

IPR Papers & Reports

As 2016’s national election made clear, striking ideological differences between cities and their surrounding states exist in many parts of the country. One way this divide is manifesting itself is in state governments passing laws with the sole purpose of outlawing particular local conduct. For instance, recent state legislation has prohibited local governments from establishing a minimum wage, from prohibiting the use of plastic bags, and from protecting the rights of transgender individuals to use the bathroom of their identified gender. These state actions do not create substantive law; instead, they merely curtail the grant of authority—known, broadly speaking, as …

Technological Innovation, Data Analytics, And Environmental Enforcement, David L. Markell, Robert L. Glicksman, Claire Monteleoni

Scholarly Publications

Technical innovation is ubiquitous in contemporary society and contributes to its extraordinarily dynamic character. Sometimes these innovations have significant effects on the environment or on human health. They may also stimulate efforts to develop second-order technologies to ameliorate those effects. The development of the automobile and its impact on life in the United States and throughout the world is an example. The story of modern environmental regulation more generally includes chapters filled with examples of similar efforts to respond to an enormous array of technological advances.

This Article uses a different lens to consider the role of technological innovation. In …

#Betterrules: The Appropriate Use Of Social Media In Rulemaking, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

In December 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) use of various social media tools in a rulemaking under the Clean Water Act violated prohibitions in federal appropriations laws against publicity, propaganda, and lobbying. Although academics previously explored whether the use of technology in rulemaking might violate the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), the Paperwork Reduction Act, or the Federal Advisory Committee Act, none predicted that one of the first firestorms surrounding the use of social media in rulemaking would arise out of federal appropriations laws. ...

As the Administrative Conference of the United States …

Chile, The Biobio, And The Future Of The Columbia River Basin, Jerrold A. Long

Articles

No abstract provided.

Regulating With Reasonable Use:Lessons From Drought Management In The Russian River Watershed, John Ugai

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

A Us Clean Energy Transition And The Trump Administration, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The Obama administration undertook several steps giving the US federal government a leadership role in a clean energy transition. Among other actions, the administration develop a Climate Action Plan, successfully negotiated higher fuel vehicle standards with car manufacturers, passed the Clean Power Plan, and signed the Paris Climate Agreement. Although the United States had been party to other international climate agreements and was a signatory to the Rio Declaration, other federal efforts were lax at best.

During his election campaign, Donald Trump promised his supporters to eliminate the Clean Power Plan, withdraw from the Paris Agreement, curtail the Environmental Protection …

From Gorsuch To Gorsuch: Family Reformation On Agency Power, Matthew Noxsel

Florida A & M University Law Review

Although Chevron has drawn extensive scholarship examining its doctrinal origins,17 evolution,18 and impact,19 this is not one of those inquiries. Instead, this Comment seeks to address some of the circumstances and rationale motivating certain people behind Chevron, and therefore the doctrine and its impact will be discussed in short form. Accordingly, Part II of this Comment will use Anne Gorsuch’s service at the EPA as a lens through which to view the conservative revolution that occurred before and during the Reagan years, with an eye toward a subtle change in thinking from previous generations regarding agency regulations. Part III of …

Access To Trade Secret Environmental Information: Are Trips And Trips Plus Obligations A Hidden Landmine?, Dalindyebo Shabalala

School of Law Faculty Publications

Freedom of Information Acts (FOIAs) have been fundamental to enabling access to environmental information. The effectiveness of domestic and international environmental regulatory standards has been dependent on ensuring strong information access regimes, especially for information submitted to governments by firms. However, there has been an ongoing tension between providing and accessing complete regulatory information on the one hand, and the interest in maintaining the economic value of trade secrets. Such tensions have historically been managed at the domestic level within constitutional structures balancing access to information, privacy interests, and economic interests. However, the almost simultaneous advent of international norms and …

Why Environmental Policies Fail, Jan G. Laitos, Juliana Okulski

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Proposing environmental policy which is consistent with the laws of nature, this book is for those who are not just interested in the ways humans have harmfully altered their environment, but instead wish to learn why the many governmental policies in place to curb such behaviour have been unsuccessful. Since humans began to exploit natural resources for their own economic ends, we have ignored a central principle - nature and humans are not separate but are a unified interconnected system, where neither is superior to the other. Policy must reflect this reality. We failed to follow this principle in exploiting …

Constitutional Protection For Future Generations From Climate Change, Ylam Nguyen

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Mono Lake, Matthew J. Brown

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Editor In Chief Note, Matthew J. Brown, Morgan B. Mcgill

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

California’S Drought And The Environment: An Introduction, Leon F. Szeptycki, Brian E. Gray

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.

Conjunctive Use On The Yuba: Lessons From Drought Management In The Yuba Watershed, John Ugai

UC Law Environmental Journal

No abstract provided.