Just four years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, there are serious warning signs that the Agreement could unravel in the 2020s. Not only did President Trump’s 2017 withdrawal announcement damage the universality and reciprocity of the Agreement, but many parties are not on track to reach their own ...

In the nearly fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, hurricane victims’ efforts to recover for the Army Corps of Engineers’ construction and maintenance of New Orleans’s faulty levee systems have slowly wended their way through the courts. After the Federal Circuit held in St. Bernard Parish Government v. United States that ...

Increasingly complex environmental challenges reveal the necessity of creative, decisive regulatory solutions. Effective public policy responses to the distributional effects of a changing climate require nuanced analysis and collaborative effort by each branch of government. The analysis supporting the D.C. Circuit’s recent endorsement of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new policy ...

What can be done about the recent phenomenon of intense wildfire air pollution in the American West? Wildfire science emphasizes the importance of using fire as a natural, regenerative process to maintain forest health and reduce large wildfire air pollution events. But forestry management policy has long emphasized suppressing wildfires, ...

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 ...