Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) to address hazardous substances releases from industrial operations. Although the statute was meant to provide communities with a means of self-protection, CERCLA actions are often commenced by a government agency against a polluter or a group of potentially responsible ...

Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has been a powerful tool for regulating waterborne pollutants. Despite the success of the Clean Water Act in mitigating water pollution, unforeseen challenges arise when regulators use the Clean Water Act to regulate nonconventional pollutants, including invasive species. Invasive species continue to wreak havoc ...

Chinese environmental public interest litigation has assumed increasing attention and significance in recent years. By simply granting standing to public authorities and environmental groups to challenge “acts of polluting or damaging the environment that have harmed the public interest,” the amended Civil Procedure Law of 2012 and Environmental Protection Law ...

Notwithstanding adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate change, mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions appears unlikely to achieve the stated goal of limiting the mean global temperature increase to 2°C. Under many scenarios, achieving this goal would require not only vigorous mitigation efforts, but also the deployment of carbon dioxide ...

In 2008, Hawai‘i’s electric utilities and state government committed to transforming Hawai‘i into a world leader in the adoption of renewable energy. The characteristics of Hawai‘i’s electricity system—including high imported fossil fuel costs—appeared to make this project more technically feasible, economically attractive, and politically popular in Hawai‘i than in any ...

Farmland preservation has become an important pursuit for those seeking to protect the working landscape. One of the most common approaches for securing this protection is through the targeted use of agricultural conservation easements, typically perpetual land use agreements designed to limit incompatible activities in order to preserve future agricultural ...

Recent years have shown an uptick in lawsuits involving sustainability disclosures, or lack thereof, by companies. In the United States, litigation involving sustainability disclosures has primarily arisen in two statutory contexts: securities fraud (federal law) and consumer protection or consumer fraud (state and federal law). Essentially, these cases involve allegations ...

The continuing failure of the federal government to respond to the growing threat of climate change, despite affirmative duties to do so, creates a governance vacuum that the Constitution might help fill, if such a responsibility could be found within the document. This Article explores textual and non-textual constitutional support ...