Standing Doctrine, Judicial Technique, and the Gradual Shift from Rights-Based Constitutionalism to Executive-Centered Constitutionalism

Although scholars have long criticized the standing doctrine for its malleability, its incoherence, and its inconsistent application, few have considered whether this chaos is related to the Court\u27s insistence that standing be used as a tool to maintain separation of powers. Most articles on standing, at least those written in the last thirty years, do not question whether standing should be freighted with separation of powers principles, but whether the standing doctrine, as applied in a given case, is consistent with those principles. These treatments, which largely accept that the constitutional aspect of standing derives from separation of powers, are unsatisfying because they do not effectively consider the more fundamental query-i.e., why has a political concept (separation of powers) been attached to a legal framework (standing)? Nothing in the general conception of separation of powers would seem to require the intricate standing rules the Court has developed. This Article addresses why the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger began to deploy separation of powers language when evaluating whether a particular plaintiff had standing to sue the federal government, and why this trend continued through William Rehnquist\u27s tenure as Chief Justice and affects the Roberts Court today. My analysis indicates that the Burger and Rehnquist Courts radically changed the standing inquiry by freighting it with political concepts, and in so doing were able to weaken the rights-based constitutionalism that had marked the Warren Court era. This, in tum, made more room for executive branch policy-making and action. I conclude that the standing decisions of the Burger and Rehnquist Courts, by merging the legal discourse of standing to sue with the political discourse of separation of powers, laid the foundation for the Roberts Court to initiate a move away from a rights-based jurisprudence to a jurisprudence that provides constitutional space for a unitary executive

Transformative Properties of FDR\u27s Court-packing Plan and the Significance of Symbol

In this Article, I begin by laying a basic theoretical foundation for understanding how language choice provides contextual cues to direct interpretation. Next, I analyze cases that use the Court-Packing Plan language. I argue that these references are intended to trigger a response in the reader that is sympathetic to judicial independence and, in some instances, to judicial incursions into policymaking. I then analyze references to the switch in time language, extracting the arguments about constitutional methodology and judicial activism embedded in that phrase. Here, I argue that the phrase switch in time is deployed to remind the reader of what happens when the Court overreaches and finds it necessary to radically change course or risk permanent institutional damage. Finally, I consider the implications of using both of these phrases in the same opinion. I contend that attention to language choice uncovers how the judiciary uses the institutional clash of the 1930\u27s as a rhetorical tool and reveals how this episode in America\u27s political and legal history entered our culture of argument about our system of government and the role of the judiciary as a constitutional decision-making body within that system

Challenges and Benefits of an Open ICT Architecture for Urban Water Management

AbstractThe UrbanWater project (FP7-ICT-318602) is focused on developing an open and flexible service execution platform and a core of innovative services for urban integrated management using real time data. The emphasis in UrbanWater is put on sharing the same data formats among the different services and developing a set of open interfaces that allow collaboration between services. In addition to this, a central node is being developed in order to provide a single point for monitoring the performance of all implied services, providing security as a service and also a single access point to shared data and services offered by third-party service providers

Cumulative Impact of Environmental Pollution and Population Vulnerability on Pediatric Asthma Hospitalizations: A Multilevel Analysis of CalEnviroScreen.

The CalEnviroScreen created by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, Sacramento, USA, is a place-based dataset developed to measure environmental and social indicators that are theorized to have cumulative health impacts on populations. The objective of this study was to examine the extent to which the composite scores of the CalEnviroScreen tool are associated with pediatric asthma hospitalization. This was a retrospective analysis of California hospital discharge data from 2010 to 2012. Children who were hospitalized for asthma-related conditions, were aged 0-14 years, and resided in California were included in analysis. Rates of hospitalization for asthma-related conditions among children residing in California were calculated. Poisson multilevel modeling was used to account for individual- and neighborhood-level risk factors. Every unit increase in the CalEnviroScreen Score was associated with an increase of 1.6% above the mean rate of pediatric asthma hospitalizations (rate ratio (RR) = 1.016, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.014-1.018). Every unit increase in racial/ethnic segregation and diesel particulate matter was associated with an increase of 1.1% and 0.2% above the mean rate of pediatric asthma, respectively (RR = 1.011, 95% CI = 1.010-1.013; RR = 1.002, 95% CI = 1.001-1.004). The CalEnviroScreen is a unique tool that combines socioecological factors and environmental indicators to identify vulnerable communities with major health disparities, including pediatric asthma hospital use. Future research should identify mediating factors that contribute to community-level health disparities

Environmental Resistance: Defying Capitalism\u27s Structure of False Rebellion

This Article analyzes a collection of landmark environmental protection laws and mainstream ecological strategies to point out their concessions to the overarching capitalist paradigm and to begin thinking about resistance as a distinctive experience that has the ability to move environmentalism beyond the constraints currently imposed on it by capitalist structures, language, and psychology. Part II examines the theories of and arguments for market-based environmental protection strategies, concluding with a critique of those strategies. Part III explores the false antinomy between capitalism and environmentalism as it is currently expressed within United States environmental law. Part IV discusses how the false antinomy between environmental protection and capitalism (that environmental laws and market-based ecologies can operate as a check on capitalist excess) masks the true antipathies between them (that environmental protection and capitalism are inherently oppositional), antipathies so fundamental that they make current environmental protection laws inadequate and market-based ecology ineffective. After tracing the relationship between environmental protection and capitalism through the various discourses according to which it has been framed and showing the limitations of the dominant frame, in Part V of this Article, I propose a nascent philosophical analysis of environmental resistance and provide some preliminary conditions for reframing such resistance in terms of force

Transformative Properties of FDR\u27s Court-packing Plan and the Significance of Symbol

In this Article, I begin by laying a basic theoretical foundation for understanding how language choice provides contextual cues to direct interpretation. Next, I analyze cases that use the Court-Packing Plan language. I argue that these references are intended to trigger a response in the reader that is sympathetic to judicial independence and, in some instances, to judicial incursions into policymaking. I then analyze references to the switch in time language, extracting the arguments about constitutional methodology and judicial activism embedded in that phrase. Here, I argue that the phrase switch in time is deployed to remind the reader of what happens when the Court overreaches and finds it necessary to radically change course or risk permanent institutional damage. Finally, I consider the implications of using both of these phrases in the same opinion. I contend that attention to language choice uncovers how the judiciary uses the institutional clash of the 1930\u27s as a rhetorical tool and reveals how this episode in America\u27s political and legal history entered our culture of argument about our system of government and the role of the judiciary as a constitutional decision-making body within that system