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My name is Candice Youngblood, and I am a third-year student here at Berkeley Law. More importantly, I am a member of Students for Economic and Environmental Justice, also known as SEEJ. On behalf of SEEJ, it is my pleasure to welcome you all to our 2019 Symposium, “Ground-Truthing Injustice.” ...

A cornerstone of the environmental justice movement is to allow residents of communities to speak for themselves. To understand the themes explored in the transcripts and articles in this special issue, it is important to first understand the history of this movement. . .

Courts in key climate change cases have abdicated their constitutional responsibility to protect a prejudiced and disenfranchised group (nonvoting minors and future generations) and remedy an insidious pathology in public discourse and the political process: the industry-funded climate disinformation campaign. This Article posits that this abdication results from courts’ uneasiness ...

Parties to the Paris Agreement can engage in voluntary cooperation and use internationally transferred mitigation outcomes towards their national climate pledges. Doing so promises to lower the cost of achieving agreed climate objectives, which allows countries to increase their mitigation efforts with given resources.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is the centerpiece of federal environmental law. This “broadest and perhaps most important” of environmental laws requires federal agencies to publicly weigh environmental impacts before proceeding with federal actions. NEPA has been criticized because it can delay development. Other critics describe NEPA as “bureaucratic ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the last few years, coastal municipalities and communities throughout the United States have filed several near-identical state common law nuisance claims against major oil companies for contributing to climate change through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While the claims raise numerous interesting and difficult questions, one major issue is whether ...

Climate change, especially its symptom of sea level rise, will “unsettle expectations” and present unique challenges to takings jurisprudence. Historically, most takings issues focused on situations with clear instances of causation. For example, requiring a physical intrusion upon or forbidding development on private property clearly hinders a landowners’ ability to ...

Climate litigation is becoming increasingly common in courts around the country, as affected parties turn to the judicial branch following more than a decade of congressional silence. With litigants taking their actions to court, judges have been forced to grapple with climate science as well as the fundamental legal issues ...