Bog-ged Down by Sackett: Strategies for Wetland Protection in Texas

The Clean Water Act (“CWA”) has been one of the most powerful tools for protecting the nation’s waterways since it was first passed in 1972. However, there has long been ambiguity over the scope of the authority it grants for the regulation of wetlands. In May 2023, the Supreme Court resolved this question in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency. The effect of Sackett will be to remove significant amounts of previously regulated wetlands from federal jurisdiction. Federal legislative responses are unlikely, and while there are federal programs that can help temporarily fill the gap and bring some wetlands back under federal jurisdiction, they cannot act with the same force and breadth as the CWA. This is likely to have a serious impact in the state of Texas, which has no wetland protection laws beyond the federal program. Accordingly, this Note argues that the many states—including Texas—currently lacking a wetland protection law should enact comprehensive wetland protection programs. To determine the contents of these programs, this Note analyzes successful programs in other states and makes recommendations for important elements of a new state program

Volume 11 All Staff

https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/property-law-slideshow/1032/thumbnail.jp

April 2025 Poetry Month Poetry.org Poster Photo

Photo of National Poetry Month poster 18 by 24 inches sent to by Poetry.org on display April 2025https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/poetry-month-2025-photos/1002/thumbnail.jp

Black History Month Book Display 06

Close up of book display created by Black Law Students Association in the law library from February through March 2025.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/black-history-month-2025-photos/1008/thumbnail.jp

Black History Month Book Display 04

Close up of book display created by Black Law Students Association in the law library from February through March 2025.https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/black-history-month-2025-photos/1006/thumbnail.jp

The NIH-Moderna Public-Private Partnership: A New Contractual Model for Securing Innovation

The public–private partnership between the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”) and Moderna was considered “one of the few bright spots of the pandemic.” Yet as the NIH–Moderna collaboration progressed at an unprecedented pace, going from vaccine development to FDA authorization in nine months, cracks began to appear in the partnership. Public trust in vaccinations wavered, multiple patent disputes arose, and global frustration erupted over Moderna’s lack of commitment to equitable access to the vaccine that was largely paid for by U.S. taxpayers. This Article argues that the parties’ contractual agreements did shockingly little to support or, indeed, set up the public–private partnership for success in the first instance. By relying on boilerplate intellectual property clauses and foregoing any meaningful or relevant governance structures, these agreements failed to address the unique challenges and competing interests inherent in such a partnership. Drawing on an original case study of the NIH–Moderna contractual agreements and insights from relational contract theory, this Article offers a novel approach to structuring public–private partnerships. It proposes model contractual language designed to promote transparency, resolve disputes, balance incentives, and build resilient, cooperative relationships. These provisions provide a starting point for crafting more effective collaboration agreements that can maximize the potential of public–private partnerships while ensuring equitable access to the commercialized products of government-funded innovation

Elgar Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law

The Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law is quite simply the definitive reference work in the field. Bringing together over 350 authors from across the world, the Encyclopedia sheds light on the current global state of Intellectual Property Law, providing unique insights into the discipline and how it is affected by globalization and increased regional integration

Tomorrow’s Climate Law, Today

The prospects for domestic legislation or international treaties that would require governments, businesses, and individuals to stop emitting the greenhouse gases that cause global climate change are particularly bleak these days. Even as the United States has recently passed its most ambitious climate legislation to date in the Inflation Reduction Act and related “green industrial policy” legislation, these successes were ultimately a compromise with politicians who refused to consider more direct controls on emissions. Assuming they survive the second Trump Administration, the green subsidies and nudges contained in these laws, coupled with a groundswell of private environmental governance, will do much to put the United States on a better course to reach Paris Climate Agreement targets. But forcing emitters of greenhouse gases to internalize the costs of their emissions — politically difficult as it may be — will also be necessary to avert a climate catastrophe. When put to a vote, calls for these kinds of direct controls of emissions almost always yield the same, predictable answer: not today. In this Article, I explore a potential change of approach that holds promise for surmounting these persistent political roadblocks to climate regulation and paving the way for binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The strategy builds on a well-known but underutilized device: sunrise lawmaking. Instead of writing laws and regulations that bind in the present, legislators using a sunrise deliberately delay the onset of any consequences for a significant period of time and, in so doing, buy political flexibility to take public-regarding action. This device holds enormous promise for dealing with climate law’s inherent intertemporal public choice problem — the fact that the costs of climate action land today while the benefits are realized only far in the future, when many present-day policymakers may not even be alive. While these dynamics doom most ordinary climate regulations right out of the gate, a climate sunrise sidesteps the present-day costs of action but starts a ticking clock that will culminate in stringent decarbonization obligations and steep penalties for noncompliance at some point in the future. Moreover, although a climate sunrise could always be rescinded, the same political cushion that enables enactment would serve as a buffer to rescission until closer to the sunrise, allowing the sunrise critical time to become entrenched in politics, economics, and law. The climate sunrise device is not only well suited to evade the political strictures that predictably stall climate regulation; it is also a useful way of structuring and properly incentivizing an industrial transition. While a climate sunrise would not formally require any mitigation action until later in time, the incentives would be to prepare for the possibility of an eventual sunrise and to not save all compliance until the last minute. Moreover, simply encoding society’s expectations of a zero-emissions future would harness law’s expressive powers, leading to better coordination of needed transitions. In sum, there is much that a climate sunrise would do to complement existing industrial policy strategies for decarbonization even before it formally binds. Given the constraints on more present-oriented lawmaking to address the climate crisis, policymakers would do well to turn at least some of their efforts toward defining tomorrow’s climate law today