Prints Archive

Patrick Michaels, a former professor at the University of Virginia, has built a second career at the libertarian Cato Institute issuing data-laden reports against mainstream climate change science. In his latest book, Lukewarming: The New Climate Science that Changes Everything, Michaels joins Paul Knappenberger, the assistant director for the Cato ...

The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (“AB 32”) set statewide goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. On November 30, 2015, the Supreme Court of California held in Center for Biological Diversity v. California Department of Fish and Wildlife that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) ...

In August 2016, the D.C. Circuit held that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) met its obligations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) but failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it issued an Incidental Take Permit (ITP) for the endangered Indiana bat. On the ...

Under the administrative law principle of Chevron deference, if the language of a statute is ambiguous, a court must defer to the agency’s interpretation of that language if the agency’s interpretation is reasonable. In Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Supreme Court evaluated an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision ...

Native American tribes in the Northwest once centered entire societies around the Columbia River, living on its shores and fishing salmon from its waters. Beginning in the 1930s, however, the United States built a series of hydroelectric dams on the river, flooding tribal villages and destroying traditional tribal access to ...

In People v. Rinehart, the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld a gold miner’s criminal conviction for using a suction dredge to mine the riverbed of a waterway on federal land in violation of a state moratorium on that mining method. The court reversed the California Court of Appeal’s holding that ...

In AquAlliance v. United States Bureau of Reclamation, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the United States Bureau of Reclamation’s (Bureau) decision to withhold information about the construction and location of water wells from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. However, the court ...

As 2016’s national election made clear, striking ideological differences between cities and their surrounding states exist in many parts of the country. One way in which this divide manifests itself is in state governments passing laws with the sole purpose of outlawing particular local conduct. For instance, recent state legislation ...

Farmland preservation has become an important pursuit for those seeking to protect the working landscape against conversion to nonagricultural use. 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 ...

In the forty-four years since President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA), states have become increasingly frustrated by the lack of meaningful opportunities for involvement in the Act’s implementation. This frustration has led to a national discussion on ESA reform, a Republican priority supported by the bipartisan Western Governors’ ...

For over one hundred years, presidents of both parties have used executive power to protect America’s lands and waters. Until the second half of the twentieth century, however, little attention was given to protecting the marine ecosystem. Federal authority reaches out to two hundred miles or more in the oceans ...

The most important development in legal scholarship over the past quarter century has been the rise of empirical research. Drawing upon the traditions of legal realism and the law and economics movement, a variety of social science techniques have delivered fresh perspectives and punctured false claims. But environmental law has ...

The standpoint of environmental justice has become integral to environmental law in the last thirty years. Environmental justice criticizes mainstream environmental law and advocacy institutions on three main fronts: for paying too little attention to the distributive effects of environmental policy; for emphasizing elite and professional advocacy over participation in ...

In recent years, China has adopted a range of measures for information disclosure or “open government information.” This comes as a surprise in an authoritarian system known more for secrecy and information control. Why do authoritarian leaders embrace such mechanisms, and how do state and society actors respond? This Article ...

The Clean Air Act, like many federal environmental statutes, relies upon the cooperation of state environmental agencies for its execution and enforcement. If states do not cooperate, the Clean Air Act obligates the federal government to regulate in their stead as well as to impose potentially draconian sanctions. Specifically, the ...

Fueled by increasing demand for marijuana, illegal cultivation of the drug on public lands is causing massive environmental harm. The federal government lacks the resources to wage what would be a difficult and costly campaign to eradicate these illegal grow sites and instead focuses its limited resources on enforcing the ...

The occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by a group of armed militants led by Ammon Bundy during January 2016 spotlighted public land management for a largely oblivious American public. The militants’ month-long occupation was only the latest of several armed confrontations in recent years, one of ...

Decentralization is becoming a dominant trend in many industries, and the electricity industry is no exception. Increasing numbers of energy consumers generate their own electricity and/or provide essential grid services such as storage, efficiency, and demand response. This Article offers a positive account of the emergence of these new energy ...

Scientists around the world are actively working toward de-extinction, the concept of bringing extinct species back to life. Before herds of woolly mammoths roam and flocks of passenger pigeons soar once again, the international community needs to consider what should be done about de- extinct species from a legal and ...

To the extent that litigation makes a muddle of private-party ordering, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act has created more messes than it has cleaned up. Congress enacted the Act to clean up hazardous waste spills. The litigious explosion that resulted, however, caused widespread and pervasive private sector ...