Issue 2

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 ...

Scholars have criticized the issuance of nationwide injunctions by district courts, arguing that they are an inappropriate and excessive use of power. Others have defended nationwide injunctions, asserting that they are necessary to ensure complete relief for plaintiffs.

Juliana v. United States is “no ordinary lawsuit.” Twenty-one Youth Plaintiffs from the United States have alleged that the federal government has knowingly abetted the fossil fuel industry in activities that have caused significant carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution for over fifty years. The continuation of policies and practices the government ...

The federal government owns 45.8 million acres of property in California, approximately 46 percent of the state’s total land area. Soon after President Trump took office in 2017, his administration began to threaten widespread rollbacks of protections on federal public lands. The State of California drafted California Senate Bill 50 ...