Environmental Law Commons^™

The Private Rationality Of Bottled Water Drinking, W. Kip Viscusi, Joel Huber, Jason Bell

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article examines evidence for the private rationality of decisions to choose bottled water using a large, nationally representative sample. Consumers are more likely to believe that bottled water is safer or tastes better if they have had adverse experiences with tap water or live in states with more prevalent violations of EPA water quality standards. Perceptions of superior safety, taste, and convenience of bottled water boost consumption of bottled water. Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to drink bottled water due to their relatively greater exposure to unsafe water and greater risk beliefs. The coherent network of experiences, beliefs, …

State Refusal Triggers Constitutional Crisis: Past Is Prologue On Energy And Infrastructure, Steven Ferrey

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

There is a new Constitutional “federalism” issue, pitting multiple states versus the federal government in a legal fight over control of competitive power supply as the U.S. moves to more renewable energy. In the new electric economy, while federal agencies mandate competition, several states have refused. FERC Order 1000 prohibits states' favoring monopolies via state “Rights-of-First-Refusal” to insist that all power movement be given to incumbent monopolies rather than competitively allocated. This invokes both the Supremacy Clause under Article 8 of the Constitution, as well as the Article I Commerce Clause.

State sustainable energy policy has endured 10 recent significant …

Dynamic Environmentalism And Adaptive Management: Legal Obstacles And Opportunities, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

Noted ecologist Daniel Botkin argues that "solving our environmental problems requires a new perspective" of environmental concerns that incorporates contemporary scientific understandings and embraces humanity's role in environmental management. Recognizing a new perspective is but the first step, however. There is also a need to identify how this perspective can inform environmental policy, not just on the ground but in the very institutional architecture of environmental law and management. Then comes the really hard part, for even if it is possible to conceive of how environmental management should proceed, it may be devilishly difficult to put such ideas into practice. …

Environmental Law, Eleventh Circuit Survey, Travis M. Trimble

Scholarly Works

In 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, addressing an issue of first impression, rejected the district court's use of a Lone Pine case-management order as a means of testing the sufficiency of the plaintiffs' pleadings in a state law environmental torts case. The court also interpreted Florida law to mean that plaintiffs are not required to allege that groundwater contamination exceeded regulatory maximum contaminant levels for drinking water to maintain their claims and that they could recover "stigma" damages to their property without alleging actual contamination. The United States District Court for the Middle District …

Response To Heather Gerken's Federalism And Nationalism: Time For A Détente?, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

The 2014 Farm Bill: Farm Subsidies And Food Oppression, Andrea Freeman

Seattle University Law Review

The 2014 Farm Bill ushered in some significant and surprising changes. One of these was that it rendered the identity of all the recipients of farm subsidies secret. Representative Larry Combest, who is now a lobbyist for agribusiness, first introduced a secrecy provision into the bill in 2000. The provision, however, only applied to subsidies made in the form of crop insurance. Until 2014, the majority of subsidies were direct payments and the identity of the people who received them was public information. In fact, the Environmental Working Group’s release of the list of recipients led to a series of …

Hite V. Falcon Partners: A Model Rule For Marcellus And Utica Shale States Precluding The Use Of Delay Rental Payments To Extend The Primary Term In An Oil And Gas Lease, Aaron Richardson

Akron Law Review

This Note will focus on the law of four states: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. The Background section of this note will give a description of the developments in these states that have rejuvenated the relevance of the interpretation of oil and gas leases in this region and explain why this is an important area of the law today. This section will also reveal the state of the laws regarding delay rental payments. States in this group are organized according to their treatment of the issue at hand. First, New York presents the strongest precedent upholding the extension …

The Increasing Privatization Of Environmental Permitting, Jessica Owley

Akron Law Review

This article examines the increasing privatization of environmental law by taking a close look at mitigation measures in permitting programs. As mitigation has become an increasingly important element of permitting programs, permitting agencies have looked for outside organizations to help design, monitor, and enforce the mitigation projects. Thus, compensatory mitigation projects provide a good lens for examining the role of private organizations in environmental law. There are good reasons for drawing on the power of private organizations. They can provide flexibility and expertise as well as increased capacity. However, concerns regarding democracy and accountability arise when government agencies hand off …

Toward Regional Governance In Environmental Law, Douglas R. Williams

Akron Law Review

This article will proceed in three parts. Part I provides a brief introduction to the structured institutional arrangements under the CAA and the CWA. I discuss how these programs have evolved in ways that depart from what may have been originally anticipated and how their structure poses impediments to effective environmental management. Part II provides a short summary of current thinking about the institutional architecture of our environmental programs, focusing primarily on the “environmental federalism” scholarship of recent years. I offer reasons for abandoning federalism as an appropriate institutional framework. Part III presents a conceptual, rather than tightly engineered, argument …

Looking Back To The Future: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The Future Of Environmental Law, Denis Binder

Akron Law Review

This essay is not intended as a traditional law review article, but as an essay intended to raise questions about the current status and future of Environmental Law in light of the three and one-half centuries of a developmental, exploitative ethos in America.

Power To The People: Restoring The Public Voice In Environmental Law, Albert C. Lin

Akron Law Review

Although the last forty years of environmental law have witnessed some successes, they have also increasingly revealed the limitations of existing laws and regulatory structures. Congress has been unable to pass substantial environmental legislation in recent years, notwithstanding widespread recognition of the need for better tools for responding to climate change, toxic chemicals, non-point source water pollution, and other problems. In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) has struggled in the wake of limited resources and politicization to effectively use the tools it has, and its rulemaking processes are often dominated by industry and other repeat players. To deal with …

Aligning Regulation With The Informational Need: Ecosystem Services And The Next Generation Of Environmental Law, Keith H. Hirokawa, Elizabeth J. Porter

Akron Law Review

This article explores the Clinch Coalition decision to understand why the court would perpetuate a process that systematically rejects the relevance and value of ecosystem processes in the information gathering exercise entailed in these environmental regulations. The discussion begins with an introduction to ecosystem services as a study of human dependency on the services provided by functioning ecosystems. In the second section, the article turns to the Clinch Coalition decision to outline the arguments relied upon by the court to legitimize the Forest Service’s decision to avoid an ecosystem services analysis. The article then presents the Clinch Coalition decision as …

Adaptive Management And The Future Of Environmental Law, Eric Biber

Akron Law Review

Adaptive management is the new paradigm in environmental law. It is omnipresent in scholarship and management documents and is even starting to appear in court opinions. There have been many calls for environmental law to adapt itself to adaptive management by becoming more flexible and dynamic. But does adaptive management really warrant a revolution in environmental law? Or is it adaptive management that might need to adapt to the world of environmental law? There has been an abundance of scholarship on the strengths of adaptive management, making the case for changing environmental law to embrace adaptive management. But answering the …

Recovering From The Recovery Narrative: On Globalism, Green Jobs And Cyborg Civilization, Michael Burger

Akron Law Review

In this Essay, I make a preliminary foray into this new narrative terrain, identifying several emerging legal storylines that have arisen in the wake of climate change disruptions and that I predict will prove influential in the coming years. In Part I, I discuss the ways in which new perceptions of scale are re-defining human beings’ attachments to a sense of “place” or “dwelling” and are shaping new attitudes about what constitutes the local, posing potential problems for existing federalism schemes. In Part II, I discuss the ways in which America’s long history of nationalizing nature manifests in the discourse …

Environmental Law And The Collapse Of New Deal Constitutionalism, Arthur F. Mcevoy

Akron Law Review

This Article, which is a précis for a book in progress about the history of late twentieth-century U.S. environmental law, argues that our modern environmental law is peculiarly a creature of the New Deal. Despite its obvious legacy from common-law nuisance and Progressive regulation, what makes modern environmental law different from anything that came before is the way in which reformers built it out of parts copied from New Deal reform projects: cooperative federalism, the tax-and-spend power, representation-reinforcing, rights trumps, and so on. Environmental law’s history, its character, its accomplishments, and its shortcomings thus entwined with those of the New …

Replacing Sustainability, Robin Kundis Craig, Melinda Harm Benson

Akron Law Review

This Article argues that, from a policy perspective, we must face the impossibility of even defining—let alone pursuing—a goal of “sustainability” in a world characterized by such extreme complexity, radical uncertainty, and discomfiting loss of stationarity. Instead, we need new policy directions and orientations that provide the necessary capacity to deal with these “wicked problems” in a meaningful and equitable way. The realities of current and emerging SES dynamics warrant a new set of tools and approaches to governance of those systems. Part II of this Article provides a brief history of sustainability and sustainable development, including corollary emphases on …

Symposium: The Next Generation Of Environmental And Natural Resources Law: What Has Changed In Forty Years And What Needs To Change As A Result, Kalyani Robbins

Akron Law Review

Introduction to nine perspectives changing in the field of Environmental and Natural Resources Law. These discussions, and our shared concern for the issues that will impact the planet for centuries to come, are so valuable.

Slides: The Colorado River: Innovation In The Face Of Scarcity, Anne J. Castle

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Anne J. Castle, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

40 slides

Slides: Klamath Basin Agreements: Largest River Restoration Project In American History, Amy Cordalis

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Amy Cordalis, Staff Attorney, Yurok Tribe

34 slides

Slides: The Blm And Colorado Dnr Mou: A Water-Based Partnership, Roy Smith

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Roy Smith, Bureau of Land Management

19 slides