Presidential Exit

The biggest problem that we\u27re facing right now has to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that\u27s what I intend to reverse when I\u27m president of the United States of America. Why is @BarackObama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority? President Trump signed the 30th executive order of his presidency on Friday, capping off a whirlwind period that produced more orders in his first 100 days than for any president since Harry Truman. The rash of executive orders underlines Trump\u27s focus on reversing as much of the Obama administration\u27s policy agenda as he can

‘No Net Loss’ - Instrument Choice in Wetlands Protection

While not a high priority issue for most people, the public has long recognized the general importance of wetlands. Since President George H.W. Bush\u27s campaign in 1988, successive administration have pledged to ensure there would be no net loss of wetlands. Despite these continuous presidential pledges to protect wetlands, in recent decades, as more and more people have moved to coastal and waterside properties, the economic benefits from developing wetlands (and political pressures on obstacles to development) have significantly increased. Seeking to mediate the conflict between no net loss of wetlands and development pressures, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) have employed a range of policy instruments to slow and reverse wetlands conversion. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the EPA and the Corps relied on prescriptive regulation that discouraged development of wetlands and, even if a permit for wetland filling were granted, required on-site mitigation of destroyed wetlands to ensure no net loss. To defuse the growing political pressure for substantial change to this 404 Permit process for developing wetlands, however, since the 1990s the agencies and state governments have promoted a market mechanism that seeks to ensure wetlands conservation at minimum economic and political cost. This instrument is known as wetlands mitigation banking (WMB). In WMB, a bank of wetlands habitat is created, restored, or preserved and then made available to developers of wetlands habitat who must buy habitat mitigation as a condition of government approval for development. This mechanism has also provided a model for endangered species protection and is in the process of being extended to other settings including watershed protection. Given the shift in emphasis from prescriptive regulation to trading, the government\u27s longstanding pursuit of no net loss of wetlands provides a particularly useful case study for comparing the use of regulatory and market instruments for environmental protection. Indeed, WMB provides a rare example of robust trading outside the air pollution context and the trading habitat-based goods raises very different concerns than seen in trading mobile pollutants. Examining the evolution of WMB also forces us to think carefully over how to assess the success of a trading program. The traditional measure would likely be efficiency. But one must also consider effectiveness. In this regards, WMB poses two different types of failures - failure of instrument design (a front-end problem) and failure of implementation through monitoring and enforcement (a back-end problem). As many of the case studies in this book illustrate, performance of WMB depends critically both on institutional design and implementation. Another important measure of success concerns distributional equity. Who wins and who loses from banking? Such concerns are far more difficult to assess as good or bad policy in habitat trading than the traditional hot spots of pollutant trading programs. The chapter ends by drawing out key lessons for market-based approaches to watershed protection

Establishing Relations between Law and Other Forms of Thought and Language

The law does not, and could not, exist in an intellectual or linguistic vacuum. No one believes that the law is or should be impervious to other languages, other bodies of knowledge. In this sense the argument about the ‘autonomy’ of law is an empty one: law cannot be, should not be, perfectly autonomous, unconnected with any other system of thought and expression; yet it plainly has it own identity as a discourse, it own intellectual and linguistic habits, which it is our task as lawyers to understand and develop. It follows that an essential topic of legal thought is the proper relation between law and other forms of thought and expression – a topic that is important, difficult and full of interest

Ecosystem Services and Federal Public Lands: A Quiet Revolution in Natural Resources Management

The major federal public land management agencies (the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Park Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, and Department of Defense) have increasingly adopted a language that did not exist twenty- five years ago-the language of ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are the range of benefits that ecological re- sources provide to humans, from water purification and pollination to carbon sequestration and wildlife habitat. The scientific discipline advancing the ecosystem services frame- work arose in the mid-1990s and quickly became a central strategy for fusing ecology and economics research. Despite its ascendance in research communities, the recognition and conservation of ecosystem services in law and policy has been a more gradual, incremental process. While largely unrecognized, the federal public land management agencies have been embedding consideration of ecosystem services in their policy decision making. Looking back, it is remarkable how far this quiet revolution has come. This Article traces that policy evolution and assesses why it happened, how it happened, and what it means for the future of public land management. The Article concludes by arguing that federal land management agencies\u27 emphasis on the flow of ecosystem services from public lands to off-site human communities rebuts arguments that public lands would be better managed by privatization or by increased resource extraction

Climate Change, Dead Zones, and Massive Problems in the Administrative State: A Guide for Whittling Away

Mandates that agencies solve massive problems such as sprawl and climate change roll easily out of the halls of legislatures, but as a practical matter what can any one agency do about them? Serious policy challenges such as these have dimensions far beyond the capacity of any single agency to manage effectively. Rather, as the Supreme Court recently observed in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, agencies, like legislatures, do not generally resolve massive problems in one fell swoop, but instead whittle away over time, refining their approach as circumstances change and they develop a more nuanced understanding of how best to proceed. Whether sprawl, climate change, or other daunting challenges, agencies are increasingly being told to address massive problems but without obvious tools or strategies to do so. In this Article we explore what it means for agencies to whittle away at massive problems. Administrative law scholarship has assumed that massive problems are similar to one another, focusing instead on issues of jurisdiction and instrument choice - who should whittle and which knife they should use. In Part I we argue that the nature of the problem - the stick to be whittled - deserves equal attention. Some problems, because of the presence of certain types of cumulative effects from multiple sources, are significantly more difficult for agencies to manage. In Part II, using examples from the fields of environmental and land use law, we develop a model to identify the different attributes of cumulative effects that drive massive problems and how these can distort or undermine policy responses. In Part III we explore the three different strategies currently used in administrative law to manage massive problems, showing each to be deficient. In Part IV we draw from recent scholarship on Dynamic Federalism, New Governance, and Transgovernmental Network theories to propose an effective strategy for agencies to whittle away at massive problems through loosely-linked weak ties networks of federal, state, and local agencies. Part V illustrates how this can work in practice, using a case study of water pollution in the Gulf of Mexico. We explore both how such multi-scalar, multi-agency coordination networks function and the challenges they pose for administrative law. The Court\u27s observation is quite correct - agencies, even when working together, can only whittle away at massive problems. This article takes the next step, creating models that explain the challenges posed by different types of massive problems and proposing strategies for engaging in more effective multi-agency coordination

Gaming the Past: The Theory and Practice of Historic Baselines in the Administrative State

In 1988, candidate George H. W. Bush was in a tight race for the presidency, behind in the polls to the Democratic challenger, Michael Dukakis. Stung by the D+ grade given by the League of Conservation Voters, Bush was searching for a way to claw back some of the environmental vote.\u27 He saw an opening in wetlands. Perceived as worthless swamps and wasted development opportunities for most of our nation\u27s history, conversion of wetlands for agricultural and urban land uses has resulted in a staggering loss of resources. Beginning in the 1970s, however, views started to change, with growing recognition of the valuable services wetlands provide to human populations-from flood protection and groundwater recharge to wildlife habitat. As a result, wetlands loss has increasingly been denounced as the result of paving paradise [to] put up a parking lot. Well aware of this widespread concern, Bush announced in a major policy statement a national goal of no net loss of our nation\u27s wetlands. This proved effective on the campaign trail, and, as President a year later, he adopted the goal as official government policy

4-Methyl-2,6-bis(phosphonomethyl)phenol dihydrate

The 4-methyl-2,6-bis(phosphomethyl)phenol molecule, which crystallizes with two water molecules per asymmetric unit, has approximate twofold symmetry and is involved in extensive three-dimensional hydrogen bonding in which every available OH group participates. The principal dimensions include P--O 1.4981 (13) and 1.5015 (14) ,~, four P--OH distances in the range 1.5395(14) to 1.5688(13) A, P--C 1.7857(17) and 1.7893 (17) ~k, and O...O intramolecular and intermolecular hydro.gen-bond distances in the range 2.458 (2) to 2.866 (2) A

Near-horizon geometries of supersymmetric AdS(5) black holes

We provide a classification of near-horizon geometries of supersymmetric, asymptotically anti-de Sitter, black holes of five-dimensional U(1)^3-gauged supergravity which admit two rotational symmetries. We find three possibilities: a topologically spherical horizon, an S^1 \times S^2 horizon and a toroidal horizon. The near-horizon geometry of the topologically spherical case turns out to be that of the most general known supersymmetric, asymptotically anti-de Sitter, black hole of U(1)^3-gauged supergravity. The other two cases have constant scalars and only exist in particular regions of this moduli space -- in particular they do not exist within minimal gauged supergravity. We also find a solution corresponding to the near-horizon geometry of a three-charge supersymmetric black ring held in equilibrium by a conical singularity; when lifted to type IIB supergravity this solution can be made regular, resulting in a discrete family of warped AdS(3) geometries. Analogous results are presented in U(1)^n gauged supergravity.Comment: Latex, 29 pages. v2: minor improvements, references adde

Regulatory Exit

Exit is a ubiquitous feature of life, whether breaking up in a marriage, dropping a college course, or pulling out of a venture capital investment. In fact, our exit options often determine whether and how we enter in the first place. While legal scholarship is replete with studies of exit strategies for businesses and individuals, the topic of exit has barely been touched in administrative law scholarship. Yet exit plays just as central a role in the regulatory state as elsewhere – welfare support ends; government steps out of rate-setting. In this article, we argue that exit is a fundamental feature of regulatory design and should be explicitly considered at the time of program creation. Part I starts from first principles and sets out the basic features of regulatory exit. It addresses the design challenges of exit strategies and how to measure success of exit. With these descriptive and normative foundations in place, Part II develops a framework that explains the four basic types of regulatory exit strategies, exploring the political economy that determines each strategy and explaining when policy makers are most likely to adopt them. To demonstrate its usefulness in practice, the framework is applied as a case study in Part III to the emerging challenge of fracking. We conclude by describing a new exit strategy model for regulatory design, a hybrid approach of “Lookback Exit.†Exit is a vast, central, yet largely unexplored aspect of administrative governance. By providing a fuller account, we demonstrate why exit warrants focused research and theoretical development in its own right, create a framework for the analysis of exit issues, and identify the key questions for future research. Doing so provides important insights not only to understand the practice we see around us today but also for the design of programs to manage emerging issues