Local Development and Sustainable Periurban Agriculture: New Models and Approaches for Agricultural Land Conservation

Periurban agricultural territories have had to confront many pressures over the last 70 years, ranging from land development pressures emanating from nearby large cities and metropolis to technological change, to the draw of the urban labour market on farmers’ families, to the consequences of climate change and variability. They are also increasingly expected to provide stable supplies of foodstuffs to the nearby urban markets as well as having the potential to respond to many other urban demands for other functions that these agricultural areas can support. Periurban agricultural areas can be considered as strategic components of urban and metropolitan regions. They have much more to offer to their regional economies and societies than simply food production because they are also support multiple functions, both market-based and non market function. Market-based functions include the production of foodstuffs for the urban market as well as functions related to both tourism and leisure activity. Non-market based functions include the conservation of landscape heritage, and water and biodiversity conservation; some of these can also be transformed into functions that generate supplementary income for the farming families. Some functions serve to strengthen the linkages between farming, farm families and nearby urban areas. For this strengthening to occur, it appears essential that: a) farmers and their families become involved in the development of their own multifunctional agriculture-based projects; and b) the significance of the non-agricultural functions must also be appropriated by non-agricultural actors, such as local government, nearby city governments, community and consumer organisations. These points are illustrated by examples drawn from several countries, including research-action projects involving the two authors neat Montréal. These latter projects, appropriated by the local farming communities, involve local development processes that can be modified to deal with periurban agricultural areas in any political and cultural context. These processes involve the development of new models of agricultural development and relatively new approaches to local and community development. These processes reinforce regional and national programs of agricultural land ‘protection’ which, it is argued, need such supportive local and community development processes in order to be effective.

Government versus Governance: structure versus process

It should be noted straight away that Governance is not Government, although government at any level can potentially become part of a governance process. Governance essentially is a multi-stakeholder process (e.g. the article by David Douglas); it can be focused on a whole territory or on particular themes or orientations of importance to a territory and different actors and citizens; however, it frequently becomes necessary to take a more holistic approach since it is more often than not the..

Presidential Signing Statements and Congressional Oversight

In response to highly controversial statements issued by President George W. Bush upon signing various bills into law, an American Bar Association Task Force and Senator Arlen Specter both recently called for the creation of a cause of action to obtain a federal judicial declaration concerning the legal validity of future presidential signing statements. This essay argues that such legislation would be ill-advised and counterproductive. It would exacerbate existing underlying institutional infirmities. More fundamentally, the inclination to facilitate immediate resort to the judiciary for resolution of a dispute between the political branches about the President\u27s constitutional obligations is premised on an unidentified, unjustified (and in my view unjustifiable) assumption about the relative roles of Congress and the Court. Specifically, the proposed law assumes that the Court, rather than Congress, is primarily responsible for ensuring that the President remains subject to the rule of law. This premise has matters backwards. Under our constitutional text, structure, and traditions, properly understood, Congress has far greater competence and legitimacy than do the courts to undertake the awesome task of compelling presidential compliance with the Constitution and laws of the United States. It is the judicial role in so doing that can be best understood as incidental and sharply circumscribed by concerns about competence and legitimacy. Indeed, absent longstanding congressional neglect of its many, powerful tools for disciplining the executive branch, routine and open presidential assertions of the intent to disregard statutory provisions just signed into law would be all but inconceivable. Were Congress to act on Senator Specter\u27s pending bill, the resulting legislation would further entrench this congressional neglect and atrophy the congressional muscles alone capable of resisting a truly lawless President. Ironically, the bill\u27s unintended but most significant long-term consequence would be to make all the more likely the kind of presidential usurpation of the law-making function that the ABA Task Force report and Senator Specter warn against

The Empirical Judiciary

This essay reviews David L. Faigman’s Constitutional Fictions: A Unified Theory of Constitutional Facts (Oxford U.P. 2008). Constitutional Fictions is a highly original book that promises to (and should) have an enormous impact on both constitutional law scholarship and practice. The book focuses on the methods, or lack thereof, that the Court employs in receiving evidence and resolving disagreements about questions of fact in constitutional cases. In doing so, the book does the legal profession an invaluable service by identifying and articulating the many frequently unspoken questions that arise in the context of judicial consideration and resolution of legislative facts in constitutional cases. The book also documents the largely unremarked ubiquity of these questions, the wide variety of circumstances in which they occur, and the depth of the theoretical issues they implicate. Professor Faigman accomplishes all this in crisp, lucid, and admirably concise prose. Nor could Professor Faigman’s book be more timely. Several of the Roberts Court’s most salient and controversial constitutional decisions have turned on questions of legislative fact. Constitutional Fictions treats an important topic with impressive insight. But it will not be the last word on the subject. When Constitutional Fictions finally comes round to normative and prescriptive analysis of the status quo, Faigman shies away from the broader implications of his critique. After reviewing Professor Faigman’s arguments, this review essay explores how alternative analyses might compel more sweeping changes than he suggests

The Third Death of Federalism

Federal drug laws proved a stumbling block to the Rehnquist Court\u27s attempted federalism revival. In its final year, the Court\u27s fragile federalism coalition splintered in a pair of cases arising under the Controlled Substances Act ( CSA ). Missing from the emerging legal literature concerning those two decisions is any substantive discussion of the Supreme Court\u27s much earlier, ill-fated efforts to preserve both judicial enforcement of the enumerated powers doctrine and federal narcotics laws. This article fills that gap. Ninety-odd years ago the Court arrived at the same jurisprudential juncture it now confronts. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the White and Taft Courts similarly faltered when the Justices professed dedication to federalism was tested by congressional overreaching in the name of guarding the people from narcotics and other temptations to perceived moral vices. In sustaining what the Justices no doubt believed to be laudatory federal morals regulations, they sowed the seeds of federalism\u27s first death twenty years later. For during the constitutional crisis of the 1930s, the Court\u27s critics pointed to this earlier compromise of federalism principles in their efforts to expose as pre-textual the Court\u27s invalidation of New Deal legislation on the ground that it exceeded Congress\u27s enumerated powers. This article explores the parallels between the neglected history of federal narcotics laws and the Court\u27s recent rulings in Gonzales v. Raich and Gonzales v. Oregon. The full significance of those decisions can be perceived only when they are viewed in the light cast by the turbulent history of federal narcotics regulation. Then and now, drug abuse provokes intense reactions, both physical and emotional. The history suggests that now, as then, the Court\u27s decisions may prove more portentous than they might at first appear. In addition, this parallel also begs more general questions about the feasibility of judicial efforts to enforce federalism. The final part of this article identifies and ventures some preliminary reflections on these issues