Prints Archive

In January 2017, the Second Circuit upheld the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Water Transfers Rule (Rule), reversing a decision by the Southern District of New York to vacate the Rule and remand the matter to the EPA.1 The decision in Catskill IV was greeted as a victory by many ...

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 ...

In 2017, multiple claims and declarations from around the legal world appeared to signal a tipping point in the global acceptance of a new and evolving legal status for nature. Whether it was litigation in the United States, India, and Colombia, or legislation emanating from New Zealand and Australia, the ...

With the full participation and consent of Congress, President Trump has embarked upon a radical project to freeze and roll back federal regulations that protect public health, safety, the environment, and the economy. The principal justification for this project, publicly announced by both Congress and President Trump, is the claim ...

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke ...

I am honored to introduce Ecology Law Quarterly’s special issue on environmental governance and technology. This dedicated volume focuses on the tension between rapidly advancing data technology and slower-moving law and policy adaptation. This issue could not come at a more important time, as we are in the midst of ...

Environmental regulation invariably requires making decisions in the face of scientific uncertainty. However, making decisions in the near-absence of evidence—essentially, the most extreme uncertainty—is a special case because it most plainly exposes the defaults and preferences of those making the decisions, and because it may inspire creative ways of reducing ...

Technical innovation is ubiquitous in contemporary society and contributes to its extraordinarily dynamic character. Sometimes these innovations have significant effects on the environment or on human health. They may also stimulate efforts to develop second-order technologies to ameliorate those effects.

The history of the U.S. environmental justice movement reveals that successful campaigns are seldom waged solely through litigation. Instead, communities have employed litigation and administrative actions as part of a broader grassroots struggle to achieve short- and long-term change.

It is our pleasure to introduce Ecology Law Quarterly’s 2016–17 Annual Review of Environmental and Natural Resource Law. This is the Annual Review’s eighteenth year and is a product of collaboration among the ELQ editors and student authors, Berkeley Law’s environmental law faculty, and the Center for Law, Energy and ...

Today in California, urban infill development proliferates. A welcome alternative to decades of greenfield expansion, this infill boom is the culmination of regulatory incentives like SB 375, economic growth in urban areas, as well as increasing awareness of the climate evils of vehicle emissions (quantified in vehicle miles traveled, or ...

Hydraulic fracturing, an oil and gas drilling technique commonly referred to as “fracking,” has experienced a profound expansion in the United States since the dawn of the twenty-first century. Providing an influx of cheap oil and gas and new job opportunities, the boom has worked wonders for the American economy. ...

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is one of our nation’s oldest environmental statutes. It was passed decades before the major environmental law renaissance of the 1970s, and is lesser known than the more contemporary wildlife protection statutes that dominate headlines and political debate, such as the Endangered Species Act.