Climate Change and Great Lakes Water Resources

Looks at how climate change will impact water resources in the Great Lakes region and identifies policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change

Oil and Freshwater Don\u27t Mix: Transnational Regulation of Drilling in the Great Lakes

In the wake of the Gulf oil blowout disaster, there is renewed interest in protecting the freshwater of the Great Lakes from the risks of oil drilling. The region has significant oil resources that would be economically and technologically accessible through drilling in the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes bottomlands and shorelines are subject to the regulatory jurisdiction of two countries—-the United States and Canada—-and eight American states. While the existing legal regime lacks uniformity, and is characterized by jurisdictional inconsistency and potential for transboundary pollution externalities, oil drilling is mostly prohibited. With strong public support for protecting the Great Lakes, there is an opportunity to further strengthen oil drilling regulation in the Great Lakes through international and domestic law

The Evolving Role of Citizens in United States-Canadian International Environmental Law Compliance

Citizen participation is critical in environmental law compliance. While citizens often have a major role in advancing compliance with domestic environmental law, citizens have historically had a much more limited role in international environmental law. However, a new model is emerging in North America. The role of citizens in United States-Canadian international environmental law compliance has expanded greatly over the past several decades. Beginning in the 1970s with increased public participation in binational governance agreements and expanding in the past two decades to formal roles in monitoring implementation of international environmental agreements, citizen participation is now central to the United States-Canadian international environmental legal regime

Transboundary Pollution: Harmonizing International and Domestic Law

Addressing transnational pollution requires both international and domestic law. Transnational pollution is an international problem that demands and deserves the attention of international legal mechanisms such as treaties, agreements, arbitration, and international management and governance. At the same time, transnational pollution problems can often be addressed more effectively and efficiently through the domestic legal system. An ideal approach is to harmonize transnational pollution management and dispute resolution under international and domestic law. This Article seeks to provide pragmatic, feasible, and politically realistic solutions to transnational pollution by harmonizing international and domestic law. However, given the diversity in geography, domestic legal systems, and political realities that frame transnational pollution problems around the world, a specific pragmatic solution in one region may be useless or impossible in another region. Thus, this Article focuses on transnational pollution problems and harmonizing the relevant international and domestic laws of one transnational region, the United States-Canada border, with the hope that it may provide lessons and potential models that will be valuable to policy makers and scholars elsewhere

Flint\u27s Fight for Environmental Rights

This Essay reviews the recent development of environmental rights within U.S. constitutional law, advanced through a series of federal court decisions in the wake of the Flint water crisis. The residents of Flint were poisoned and lied to by their government for nearly two years. They experienced how American environmental governance has failed at the state and federal levels and how our environmental laws leave individuals and communities unprotected. And then Flint fought back, in the courts, for five years. Flint residents have been overwhelmingly successful, achieving some justice for themselves and advancing substantive rights and remedies within our constitutional framework for all Americans. Their legal victories established precedents for courts to use their equitable powers to order systemic remedies to environmental injustices, protect the right to bodily integrity—as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Substantive Due Process Clause—against involuntary pollution and toxic exposure, and hold the U.S. government accountable for inaction in administering our environmental laws. Flint’s fight for environmental rights has turned the Flint water crisis into a breakthrough event in environmental and constitutional law

Toward A New Horizontal Federalism: Interstate Water Management in the Great Lakes Region

This article presents a new model for environmental policy, called cooperative horizontal federalism. The cooperative horizontal federalism approach utilizes a constitutional mechanism for states to bind themselves to common substantive and procedural environmental protection standards, implemented individually with regional resources and enforcement. Here, the concept of the cooperative horizontal federalism model is illustrated through the recently proposed Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact. Under this proposed compact, the eight Great Lakes states would cooperatively manage the world\u27s largest freshwater resource under common minimum standards, which are then incorporated into state law and implemented individually. This cooperative horizontal federalism approach avoids the race to the bottom that often undermines individual state efforts, but still allows states the flexibility to craft environmental policies best suited to their specific needs and preferences

Political Externalities, Federalism, and a Proposal for an Interstate Environmental Impact Assessment Policy

Interstate environmental harms, which occur when decisions or actions in one state produce negative environmental impacts in another state, have challenged environmental law and American federalism for over a century. While even the strongest advocates of state primacy in environmental policy concede that interstate environmental harms necessitate federal governance, federal adjudication and regulation have had only modest success in addressing the problem. This is due, in part, to a failure to fully understand the causes of interstate environmental harms. This article provides a newframeworkfor understanding interstate environmental harms as political externalities caused by a combination of inadequate information, public process bias, and traditional economic externalities. To address these causes, this article proposes a new state-based approach termed interstate environmental impact assessment. Interstate environmental impact assessment would provide a procedural mechanism for an affected state and its citizens to influence the source state and minimize or prevent interstate environmental harms. The process itself would address the causes of political externalities, and also produce information to improve federal adjudication and regulation when disputes arise over continuing harms