Environmental Law Stories
Authors:
Lazarus, Richard J. / Houck, Oliver A.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2005
12 chapters
have results for environment
Chapter 7 The Story of Laidlaw: Standing and Citizen Enforcement 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- thus firmly rejected an inordinate focus on proof of harm to the environment, in so doing adopting a standing framework that deferred to legislative judgments. Standing litigation will continue, especially in claims regarding government regulatory actions allegedly affecting the environment, but in citizen versus polluter cases,
- plaintiffs in environmental cases had to establish harm to the excessively polluted river that in turn injured the plaintiffs. Instead, the seven Justice majority stated that “[t]he relevant showing for purposes of Article III standing, however, is not injury to the environment but injury to the plaintiff.” Court tied this focus on the plaintiff’s injury and reasons courts cannot require additional proof of environmental harm by once again emphasizing the statutory framework: “[t]o insist upon the former [injury to the environment] rather than the latter as part of the standing inquiry … is to raise the standing hurdle higher than the necessary showing for success on the merits alleging noncompliance with a [Clean Water Act] permit.”
- The wholesale firing of Pravlik and her classmates “solidified” Pravlik’s commitment to work to protect the environment.
- Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment,
- This dense discussion of congressional power and standing spawned substantial lower court litigation and scholarly comment. It also created a critical ambiguity regarding standing analysis, especially for environmental litigants. To what extent do underlying statutes providing a cause of action influence what kinds of claims and injuries will be adequate to justify standing? Is judicial judgment about the presence of “injury,” or legislative goals and means to achieving those goals, critical to standing analysis? Relatedly, is the analysis called for of injury or threatened injury to interests of the plaintiff, or need courts find harm to the underlying environment? These key interrelated questions were left uncertain by
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Chapter 3 The Story of Calvert Cliffs: A Court Construes the National Environmental Policy Act to Create a Powerful Cause of Action 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Managing The Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy 202
- Environment: A New Focus for Public Policy
- NEPA was enacted to address agency indifference or hostility in a transformative, across the board manner by sending a Congressional directive to the federal mission agencies to assess the environmental consequences of their activities, to presume sufficient authority to protect the environment unless Congress had expressly withheld the authority, and to coordinate more effectively their activities with each other. The original version had no environmental impact statement requirement; it only authorized the Secretary of Interior to conduct ecological research, ..., even within the small conservation community, although there was initial opposition from the new administration of Richard M. Nixon and a few members of Congress. The opposition was more jurisdictional. Senator Jackson adroitly maneuvered around this opposition, but in the process NEPA was both strengthened and weakened. A provision recognizing a right to a healthful environment was dropped, but the “action-forcing” EIS...
- [I]nclude in every recommendation or report on proposals for legislation and other major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment, a detailed statement by the responsible official on—
- (iv) the relationship between local short-term uses of man’s environment and the maintenance and enhancement of long-term productivity, and
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Chapter 2 The Story of Reserve Mining: Managing Scientific Uncertainty in Environmental Regulation 6 results (showing 5 best matches)
- “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” Rio Declaration of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), June 14, 1992, 31 I.L.M. 874.
- Stoddard’s fears that the new administration would be hostile to the environment were confirmed when he was summarily fired and his office locks changed on January 20. However, Nixon’s Secretary of the Interior, Walter Hickel, did not countermand Udall’s order to hold an enforcement conference, probably because enforcement conferences were designed to obtain cooperation by persuasion and publicity, not to apply legal coercion. Reserve would not be required to do anything that
- accepted risk as a legitimate basis for governmental intervention to protect human health and the environment, but it demanded a more quantified and evidentially based showing to support risk-based regulation. Moreover, it placed a traditional burden of proof squarely on the governmental proponent of the regulation. Nevertheless,
- , and the result was a landmark of environmental law whose science-based, precautionary approach continues to influence the regulation of toxic threats to human health and the environment.
- tied these aesthetic concerns to toxic threats to human health and the environment.
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- VII. Retrospective: The Intersection of Land and Environment
- Dredging Navigational Channels in a Changing Scientific and Regulatory Environment
- Even more important over the long run, all sorts of combustion, from lawn mowers to coal-fired power plants, add gases to the environment that raise global temperatures and bring the oceans ever higher up onto the beach and inlets.
- strip, and even that strip “grandfathered” out pre-existing structures. Echoing California and the CZMA itself, one great advantage of this strategy was political: it concentrated attention on a specific and popular part of the coastal area, the beach, while leaving only a very slim segment of property owners (and local governmental jurisdictions) to be affected, thus isolating potential opposition. But one obvious cost to the strategy was environmental, since constricted geographical limits left the coastal environment very much at risk from even very nearby upland change. This was a problem that, as we shall see shortly, the Coastal Commission proposed to remedy in the later1980s. But by that time, another cost of narrow regulation—one that had been much less obvious in the 1970s—was emerging from the federal jurisprudence of property rights, as the Supreme Court turned up the temperature of its takings cases.
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- http://www.tva.gov/environment/ecohealth/tellico.htm (last visited July 12, 2004).
- were motivated by their view of the relative roles of Congress and the courts, not by environmental sensitivity. But the decision ensures that Congress can, when it chooses to do so, protect the environment in ways that judges might think unwise.
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- Once Timid, She Now Roars to Save the Environment
- that only economic activity, not noneconomic activity, can be aggregated under the substantial effects test. It is unclear why members of Congress supposedly eager to protect the environment would relish such a showdown. A safer approach would be to enact a statute based on the argument set forth in the government’s brief in
- The White House Plays Dirty with the Environment
- All politics may not be local, but many environmental controversies can be understood only by examining their local roots. The dispute that gave rise to the Supreme Court’s most important pronouncement about the scope of federal authority to regulate the environment was an intensely local one, involving the siting of a municipal garbage dump. A group of suburban communities wanted to use an abandoned gravel pit to dispose of their garbage; the community located nearest the site strenuously objected. Each side groped for any political or legal advantage it could obtain. The pro-dump communities won at the state regulatory and judicial level. The anti-dump community fought back, securing a veto of the site by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The pro-dump communities countered by challenging the constitutional authority of the Army Corps to regulate the site. The result was a landmark decision,
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Chapter 5 The Story of the Benzene Case: Judicially Imposed Regulatory Reform through Risk Assessment 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- For toxic chemicals in the environment, matters were much more complicated. Since very little was known about the adverse effects of ...levels of chemicals, it was difficult for the government to justify protective action by demonstrating a cause-effect relationship between exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment and the incidence of disease. Given the huge gaps in scientific knowledge, the best that a government agency could do was to show that the chemical at issue caused cancer in some highly exposed humans or in laboratory animals and that human beings in large numbers were exposed to the chemical in small concentrations. Any case for regulatory intervention built on such a slim factual foundation had to rely heavily upon protective assumptions reflecting precautionary statutory policies. In other words, when faced with large scientific uncertainties, the agency had to “err on the side of safety,” rather than rely exclusively on established scientific facts, if it was to...
- A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment
- Its use in gasoline means that benzene is a ubiquitous air pollutant in urban areas, but it is also emitted in large quantities by petroleum refineries, coke ovens, and other industrial facilities. In 1998 more than 8.5 million pounds of benzene were released into the environment, the vast majority of which consisted of air emissions.
- regulated industries, however, recognized the potential for future regulations to have a huge economic impact if the regulatory agencies were able to surmount the procedural hurdles that had thus far stymied their efforts to regulate toxics in the environment.
- Well-known occupational diseases, like black lung disease and asbestosis, were killing and maiming workers in the mining and shipbuilding industries. Although it was often difficult to prove in individual cases that exposure to a particular pollutant caused a particular fish kill or a particular asthma attack, in the aggregate it was clear that ubiquitous conventional pollutants, like sulfur dioxide in the air and biochemical oxygen demand in the water, were causing a great deal of damage to human health and the environment. It could therefore safely be assumed that reducing the quantities of conventional pollutants emitted into the air and water would bring about appreciable improvement.
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- , the public has a legitimate claim to an environment free, to the maximum extent possible, from significant health risks associated with pollution and other human-generated stressors. , technological innovation ought to be stimulated to achieve whatever advances are necessary to achieve the goals of a clean and safe environment while also enabling satisfactory economic growth and prosperity.
- After a quick retreat on regulatory reform helped the Republicans retain the House by a narrow margin, Senator John McCain offered a post-mortem in a New York Times op-ed. By showing themselves “too eager to swing the meat ax of repeal when the scalpel of reform is what’s needed,” House Republicans, McCain argued, had succeeded in making their stewardship of the environment “the voter’s number-one concern about continued Republican leadership of Congress.”
- 4 (1999) (explaining that “in the four years beginning in 1969, almost overnight in political terms, congressional action transformed what had been mainly state and local housekeeping chores into a national campaign to protect the environment. Legislation created new public participation in major government and private decisions, new notions of federalism, and new government power over big business.”). Graham’s book stresses social and political considerations that distinguish the new legislation rather than the new regulatory philosophy. Instead, it highlights elements of the new legislation’s regulatory approach that this chapter largely ignores, such as its notions of federalism, the enhanced role of citizen participation, and its skepticism toward bureaucracy.
- It seems evident that public attitudes toward public health and the environment were changing profoundly in the years leading up to the late sixties, so that getting at the causes of those changes ought to play an important role in any explanation.
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- which had emerged by the mid-seventies as a forceful advocate for the environment (and which, of course, ultimately ended up as the plaintiff in
- Even without much empirical evidence, however, framing the case in terms of “environment versus economy,” may have been an especially wise move. Bill Pedersen credits Paul Bator with this framing, and speculates that it made the case seem more consequential to the Court. Perhaps, he speculates, it reinforced the Supreme Court’s decision to grant
- note 121 and accompanying text. NSR reform is a key element of the Bush administration’s proposed Clear Skies legislation, which, if it passes, will be the first significant amendment of the CAA in fifteen years. The bill has recently faced significant setbacks, failing to reach the full Senate due to a 9–9 vote by the Environment and Public Works Committee.
- This figure was produced as a result of a single study by Communities for a Better Environment which was cited in the Respondent’s brief. The assertion was not challenged in the litigation. Even if this figure is overstated, it is conceivable that widespread state adoption of the bubble concept would lead to substantial losses—in the form of foregone gains—in air quality. This conclusion seems inescapable unless one assumes that requiring firms to meet the most stringent technology standard inhibits modernization to such an extent that it effectively cancels out the beneficial effects of requiring compliance with the standard in the first place. I thank Craig Oren for making this point. Telephone conversation, October 24, 2004 (on file with author).
- , Environment 11 (April 1993).
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- Within this complexity, it is easy, if not inevitable, to lose sight of the extraordinary events and personalities that made environmental law happen, and then made it work. The field itself was not a given. Environmental protection laws are by their nature radically redistributive. They express a dramatic reorientation of priorities and values in terms of the relationship of humankind to the natural environment and of the present to the future. They impose substantial costs on some for the benefit of others, especially future generations, and preservation values that wield little clout in the market place or ballot box. Indeed, for just this reason, political scientists and economists long asserted that a new field of of environmental protection laws would not happen.
- because, like most recent headliners in her field, it arose from environmental law, in this case the Clean Air Act. On a primary level, the case was about whether the Environmental Protection Agency could, in a reversal of policy, interpret the Act in a way to delay pollution abatement in areas already designated as unsafe for human health and the environment. In a larger sense, however, the case turned on how courts should treat administrative interpretations of law, a question of critical importance to environmental statutes that rely broadly on administrative rulemaking, and on administrations and philosophies that can change dramatically within short periods of time.
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Contributors 2 results
- is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University where he also serves as Faculty Director of the Supreme Court Institute. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois and Harvard Law School. He served as an attorney in the Environment and Natural Resources Division and as an Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States Department of Justice. He was previously on the law school faculties of Indiana University, Bloomington and Washington University in St. Louis and has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University, University of Texas and Harvard law schools. His primary areas of legal scholarship are environmental and natural resources law, with particular emphasis on constitutional law and the Supreme Court. He recently published a book on the history of U.S. environmental law,
- The New Progressive Agenda for Health Safety and the Environment
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- Publication Date: July 21st, 2005
- ISBN: 9781587787287
- Subject: Environmental Law
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: The stories in this book feature characters as diverse as community activists, small farmers, big businesses, dedicated scientists, skilled lawyers, strong-willed judges, and Presidents of the United States. Four of the ten selected cases established the field of environmental law, three others refined it, and the final three have sought to limit its effectiveness and reach. This selection mirrors the development of the field of environmental law, from the first, heady days of its creation to its current conflicts with other laws and values, including some embedded in the Constitution.
