Prints Archive

Knowing it will be judicially reviewed, an agency is pressured to produce well-reasoned and researched rules. This relationship creates a “lever” by which those who care about well-documented rules inside the judiciary and agencies can move those who act contrary to science or technical expertise. In Friends of Animals, the ...

The modern-day impacts of climate change on water availability suggest that the Court in Florida v. Georgia should have reevaluated the forty-year-old water reapportionment standards. The Court should have clarified ambiguous terms in the equitable reapportionment standards or, alternatively, gotten rid of the standards altogether.

This Note argues that the Clean Water Act (CWA) authorizes EPA to prohibit the Corps from approving general dredge and fill activity. Part I describes the statutory and regulatory background for dredge and fill permits and EPA’s veto. Part II establishes the statutory authority, legislative history, and practical reasons that ...

The ruling in Chernaik illustrates how the public trust doctrine’s theoretical foundation is rooted in a flawed analogy, rendering it ineffective for compelling government action to address climate change. A new or adapted doctrine is needed to convince the judiciary to push for government action on climate change.

This note discusses the role of cost-benefit analysis in environmental regulations.

This article discusses the role of Executive Orders in addressing Climate Change.

Despite an uptick in legal scholarship addressing resiliency and climate adaptation in general, very little of it analyzes the historic disparity between greater ex post public expenditures to recover from disasters and relatively smaller ex ante investments in disaster preparedness and prevention. This Article addresses the gap in the literature ...

In this Article, we explore the problem of beneficial insect population decline and evaluate the utility of existing federal law to reverse the trend. We offer solutions that can be implemented by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under existing federal laws without the need for additional congressional action.

This Article’s central claim is that the governance challenges posed by radical adaptation in Antarctica are surmountable. Geopolitical and security interests may make states more willing than is now evident to explore ice-sheet stabilization and amend the Antarctic Treaty System accordingly. Moreover, the legitimacy of the system relies on the ...

This Article is organized as follows. Part I details the increasingly broad domain of environmental justice concerns, from beginnings focused on the negative impacts of waste sites on disadvantaged communities to more attention over the last two years on the relationship between COVID-19 death rates and high particulate matter concentrations. ...

To understand how well CEQA is addressing wildland-urban interface development, we analyzed data on environmental review for housing projects in three large exurban counties and additional cities with substantial wildland-urban interface areas. Our results indicate that CEQA and local land-use regulation may not be adequately addressing wildland-urban interface development in ...

This Symposium Article focuses on the issue of wildfire emissions from federal forests and the challenges that wildfire emissions, and forests generally, pose for climate policy.

Historically, during times of perceived labor shortages in the U.S. agricultural industry, the federal government has enacted policies to ensure the availability of temporary agricultural guestworkers. The current H-2A Temporary Agricultural Guestworker program has been in place for decades, and its use is expanding rapidly. Yet, policies that guarantee a ...

Is there any escape from the consequences of man’s near-Promethean arrogance with fire? In spring 2021, ELQ and the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law centered this question in a half-day virtual symposium. The event brought academics, students, activists, and regulators into conversation ...

After introducing the challenge of adapting water and energy systems to climate change, this Article synthesizes prior multidisciplinary work on algorithmic decision making and modeling-informed governance—bringing together the works of early climate scientists and contemporary leaders in algorithmic decision making. From this synthesis, this Article presents a framework for analyzing ...

This Article details how the marginalization of transgender people aggravates the environmental harms that they experience, thus demanding the proactive, facilitated involvement of the transgender community in environmental outreach and response. While transgender rights continue to achieve public acknowledgment, transgender people remain almost forgotten in scientific, policy, and legal literature ...

Although the working-from-home transition has been underway for some time, it accelerated dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it may lead to permanent shifts in the workplace for millions of employees. Using an efficiency and justice lens, this Article examines the standards regarding working-from-home emissions and concludes that undercounting could ...

We are honored to introduce the Ecology Law Quarterly’s 2020–21 Annual Review of Environmental and Natural Resource Law. Now in its twenty-second year, the Annual Review is a collaborative endeavor of students and faculty. But the greatest contributors to the Annual Review are Ecology Law Quarterly’s (ELQ) editorial board and ...

In County of Maui v. Hawai’i Wildlife Fund, the Supreme Court held that “the statute requires a permit when there is a direct discharge from a point source into navigable waters or when there is the functional equivalent of a direct discharge.” The Court thus confirmed that some discharges traveling ...

Since their inception, administrative agencies have played a critical role in setting the trajectory of national regulatory schemes. Over the last several decades, agencies have become increasingly responsive to executive policy positions. Though executive control of agency action has long been accepted as a desirable system of accountability, the increasingly ...