318 research outputs found
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Thirty Years of Environmental Protection Law in the Supreme Court: Fifth Annual Lloyd K. Garrison Lecture on Environmental Law
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Environmental Law and the Supreme Court: Three Years Later (2002 Addendum)
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Docket Capture at the High Court
The declining number of cases on the Supreme Court’s plenary docket may or may not be a problem. After all, there are many good reasons that such a decline could be happening, including the obvious possibility that the Court was previously hearing too many cases that did not warrant plenary review and is now doing a better, not worse, job of picking cases. But while having fewer cases is not necessarily problematic, what is worrisome is the very real possibility that the Court’s plenary docket is increasingly captured by an elite group of expert Supreme Court advocates, dominated by those in the private bar. The same way that powerful economic interests can capture an agency or any other entity that purports to exercise authority over those interests, so too may the Supreme Court’s docket be “captured” by the more powerful economic interests that know best how to influence the decisionmaking of the Justices at the jurisdictional stage. It is, accordingly, not the number of cases on the plenary docket but rather their content that is the real problem
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Mens Rea in Environmental Criminal Law: Reading Supreme Court Tea Leaves
Environmental Law at the Crossroads: Looking Back 25, Looking Forward 25
Twenty-five years used to seem like an exceedingly long time. It certainly did when I was graduating from law school and not yet twentyfive. My perspective on time, however, has (naturally) since evolved, much as environmental law itself and the controversies surrounding it have, too, evolved. The contrast between environmental law twenty-five years ago and environmental law today is remarkable and makes clear that environmental law and lawmaking were changing in fundamental ways a generation ago, but those changes are revealed only now with the aid of hindsight. To be sure, the statutory texts of domestic environmental law are strikingly the same. And yet, it is that static quality that ironically underscores how much has changed. A generation ago, environmental law scholars would routinely comment on how the only constant in environmental law was change: its dynamic nature. Congress was regularly passing significant statutory amendments in what was largely a constructive iterative lawmaking process, involving federal and state legislatures, agencies, and courts. Some might have worried that the change was too great—making it too difficult for the regulated community to adjust and invest. Whether any such concern then was justified, the concern now is quite different: too little change rather than too much. And the static nature of environmental lawmaking here in the United States stands in sharp contrast to the dynamic nature of environmental lawmaking globally. The United States, once a lauded pioneer, now very much risks being left behind. This essay is written in celebration of the 25th Annual Meeting of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies at the University of Michigan Law School and in recognition of Michigan Law’s hosting of the Association’s inaugural meeting in 1988. The essay focuses on three topics in reflecting on the changes in environmental law and environmental lawmaking since the Association’s first meeting. The first is Congress and the politics of environmental law. The second topic concerns the courts and the changing relationship of constitutional law to environmental law. And, finally, the essay considers the contrasting nature of the challenges that environmental lawyers and environmental law face today as compared to twenty-five years ago
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Assimilating Environmental Protection into Legal Rules and the Problem with Environmental Crime
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Thirty Years of Environmental Protection Law in the Supreme Court (1999 Garrison Lecture)
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Crystals and Mud in Nature
Professor James Salzman has written a wonderful article, which promises an equally wonderful book. His article intelligently and thoughtfully examines the forces that compete, conflict, and combine in the creation of laws relating to drinking water. These include, of course, the physical characteristics of the resource itself and how the resource relates to essential biological needs of humankind. But as Professor Salzman demonstrates, the biological role is only one of several perspectives on drinking water relevant to the kind of legal rules that apply to it. The article describes drinking water as a cultural resource, a social resource, and an economic resource, contending that one has to consider each of these various "natures" of a natural resource to determine how best to fashion legal rules governing its management. The article readily reminds us how much human history and culture relates to natural resources law.
For the purposes of this commentary, however, I would like to expand on two reactions I had to the article. The first is that the article's narrow focus on one use of water undermines some of the article's conclusions by understating water's complexity. And the second is why the article made me think about dirt, and ultimately about mud, and the juxtaposition of water and dirt in natural resources law
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Counting Votes and Discounting Holdings in the Supreme Court's Takings Cases
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