In 2017 and 2018 the California Legislature passed two packages of bills aiming to address the state’s massive housing shortage. The bills focus on the state’s housing element law and Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) system. These two mechanisms were created to require cities to plan for their long-term housing ...

A well-functioning United States electricity system, also known as “the grid,” is fundamentally important to the American way of life. Nearly everyone involved—from users, to electricity generators, to transmitters, to regulators— recognizes this and agrees broadly that the system should be “resilient” to threats such as extreme weather, attack, and ...

This Note seeks to paint a picture of what working toward environmental justice should look like. Focusing on the demands that environmental justice communities voiced through the Principles of Environmental Justice, it posits that three key components are necessary to comprehensively achieve environmental justice: distributive justice, recognitional justice, and procedural ...

In the past two decades, the Supreme Court has significantly reduced the deference given to the “Jurisdictional Determinations” made by the Army Corps of Engineers under section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Previous to the Court’s holding in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army ...

In 2018, the Fourth, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits addressed whether groundwater with a sufficient hydrological connection to navigable surface water should fall within the scope of the Clean Water Act. In two simultaneously released decisions, the Sixth Circuit held that the Clean Water Act does not apply to hydrologically connected ...

The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to engage in a public participation process when making decisions that affect the environment. The technical complexity of the NEPA public participation process blocks the public from participating in an agency’s decision-making process, and agencies often struggle to take public comments seriously ...

This past June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a Ninth Circuit decision interpreting the treaties of twenty-one tribes in western Washington to include a right to not have salmon habitat so depleted that it prevented significant salmon numbers from reaching the tribes’ accustomed fishing grounds. The basis of this ...

Native American tribes have an extensive history of resisting uranium extraction on and near their reservations. Over the years, tribes have employed a myriad of approaches to combat efforts to license new uranium extraction projects. These efforts include pursuing extraction bans, advancing human rights violation arguments, and intervening on project ...