Application of the Public Trust Doctrine to Modern Fishery Management Regimes

As the state of the nation’s fisheries has declined in recent decades, fishery managers have increasingly sought more effective means for managing fishing efforts to prevent overfishing. The situation is particularly dire in marine fisheries, where studies have shown that populations of large predatory fish species such as tuna, marlin, and swordfish have declined by up to 90%. Conventional explanations for this and other declines in fish populations invoke the concepts of the “tragedy of the commons” and the “race to the fish.” The tools favored by economists to solve these problems typically involve creating some form of limited private property rights, and legal commentators have called for introducing these principles into U.S. environmental laws. The creation of these property rights raises several questions regarding impact the public trust doctrine might have in the future. Specifically, does the public trust doctrine apply to fisheries, specifically to the large offshore fisheries that are located in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone? Does the public trust doctrine prohibit the creation of private property rights in this public resource? If private property rights are allowed, how should they be designed and created in a way that upholds the government’s responsibility to protect these public resources? This Note examines the relevance of the public trust doctrine to modern fishery management, particularly in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone. Part I looks at the origins and nature of the public trust doctrine. Part I.A examines the geographic scope of the public trust doctrine and discusses the open issue of whether the doctrine applies in federal waters. Part I.B covers the uses protected by the doctrine and analyzes the impact of the doctrine on fishery management. Part II then looks at LAPPs in more detail and evaluates the arguments against them based on the public trust doctrine. The remainder of Part II demonstrates how properly designed LAPPs are consistent with the public trust doctrine

When Staying Discovery Stays Justice: Analyzing Motions to Stay Discovery When a Motion to Dismiss Is Pending

Due to the important costs and benefits of discovery, decisions that affect the scope, timing, or availability of discovery are enormously consequential. For civil litigation in federal court, district and magistrate judges make many decisions about discovery that affect the cases before them. They decide the length and number of depositions that may be taken, compel or protect against the production of large numbers of documents and electronic data searches, serve as gatekeepers for expert witness testimony, and even decide whether the parties may take discovery at all until any motions to dismiss have been resolved. This Article focuses squarely on the last issue, by both developing a framework for understanding the principles and considerations that affect whether a particular judge will stay discovery in a case pending resolution of a motion to dismiss and providing recommendations for how judges should exercise their discretion to control the discovery process. The principal goal of judges should be to reduce or balance the costs and burdens of unnecessary discovery against those of undue delay. In determining which test should be applied to achieve those ends, my principal goal is to align the burden on the judges with the risk of error in deciding a motion to stay discovery

Fracking the Public Trust

This Article explores the application of the public trust doctrine to fracking, specifically as it relates to regulations designed to prevent harms of continued greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a result of the extraction and burning of fossil fuels

The Soft Landing Problem: Minimizing Energy Loss by a Legged Robot Impacting Yielding Terrain

Enabling robots to walk and run on yielding terrain is increasingly vital to endeavors ranging from disaster response to extraterrestrial exploration. While dynamic legged locomotion on rigid ground is challenging enough, yielding terrain presents additional challenges such as permanent ground deformation which dissipates energy. In this paper, we examine the soft landing problem: given some impact momentum, bring the robot to rest while minimizing foot penetration depth. To gain insight into properties of penetration depth-minimizing control policies, we formulate a constrained optimal control problem and obtain a bang-bang open-loop force profile. Motivated by examples from biology and recent advances in legged robotics, we also examine impedance-control solutions to the dimensionless soft landing problem. Through simulations, we find that optimal impedance reduces penetration depth nearly as much as the open-loop force profile, while remaining robust to model uncertainty. Through simulations and experiments, we find that the solution space is rich, exhibiting qualitatively different relationships between impact velocity and the optimal impedance for small and large dimensionless impact velocities. Lastly, we discuss the relevance of this work to minimum-cost-of-transport locomotion for several actuator design choices

Robotic Contact Juggling

We define "robotic contact juggling" to be the purposeful control of the motion of a three-dimensional smooth object as it rolls freely on a motion-controlled robot manipulator, or "hand." While specific examples of robotic contact juggling have been studied before, in this paper we provide the first general formulation and solution method for the case of an arbitrary smooth object in single-point rolling contact on an arbitrary smooth hand. Our formulation splits the problem into four subproblems: (1) deriving the second-order rolling kinematics; (2) deriving the three-dimensional rolling dynamics; (3) planning rolling motions that satisfy the rolling dynamics; and (4) feedback stabilization of planned rolling trajectories. The theoretical results are demonstrated in simulation and experiment using feedback from a high-speed vision system.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures. | Supplemental Video: https://youtu.be/QT55_Q1ePfg | Code: https://github.com/zackwoodruff/rolling_dynamic

Climate Policy & Environmental Justice Recommendations for Colorado: Environmental Justice and the Climate Action Plan to Reduce Pollution

This report was primarily drafted in the Spring of 2019, as the Colorado Legislature considered, and ultimately enacted, HB 19-1261. Since that time, developments have only highlighted the critical importance of considering the justice impacts of any public health and environmental responses to the threat of climate change. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the stark racial and class disparities that environmental conditions have on the health of a community. The same facilities and mobile sources that emit climate pollution also typically emit particulate matter and smogforming pollution that cause respiratory illness in many communities. These underlying conditions are additional risk factors for complications from coronavirus infections. The same pollution is concentrated in lower-income areas and communities of color. Unsurprisingly, but sadly, the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on those same communities. Many others have noted that the pandemic has led to increases in racism and stigmatization of communities of color, particularly towards Asian and Asian American populations. And the pollution has seemingly gotten worse during the pandemic, as an early study indicates that relaxation of environmental rules has led to not only an increase of pollution in many frontline communities, but also a corresponding increase in disease and death related to the coronavirus. Thus, getting climate policy “right” is critical not only to address the climate crisis, but also to redress existing injustices while preventing the creation of new ones. Recent times have underscored the fact that this is a life and death question for many communities. Our hope is that this report is timely and can help ensure that Colorado continues making progress on justice issues even as it rises to the challenge posed by climate change

Efficient, Responsive, and Robust Hopping on Deformable Terrain

Legged robot locomotion is hindered by a mismatch between applications where legs can outperform wheels or treads, most of which feature deformable substrates, and existing tools for planning and control, most of which assume flat, rigid substrates. In this study we focus on the ramifications of plastic terrain deformation on the hop-to-hop energy dynamics of a spring-legged monopedal hopping robot animated by a switched-compliance energy injection controller. From this deliberately simple robot-terrain model, we derive a hop-to-hop energy return map, and we use physical experiments and simulations to validate the hop-to-hop energy map for a real robot hopping on a real deformable substrate. The dynamical properties (fixed points, eigenvalues, basins of attraction) of this map provide insights into efficient, responsive, and robust locomotion on deformable terrain. Specifically, we identify constant-fixed-point surfaces in a controller parameter space that suggest it is possible to tune control parameters for efficiency or responsiveness while targeting a desired gait energy level. We also identify conditions under which fixed points of the energy map are globally stable, and we further characterize the basins of attraction of fixed points when these conditions are not satisfied. We conclude by discussing the implications of this hop-to-hop energy map for planning, control, and estimation for efficient, agile, and robust legged locomotion on deformable terrain.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic