State Standing to Challenge Federal Authority in the Modern Administrative State

The modern administrative state relies on a model of shared governance. Federal regulatory regimes addressing a range of economic and social issues depend on the participation of state governments for their implementation. Although these state-federal partnerships are often cooperative, conflicts over the allocation of regulatory authority and administrative policy are inevitable. In recent years, states have sought to resolve some of these conflicts in the federal courts. Well-known state challenges to federal authority include challenges to environmental rules, health insurance legislation, and immigration policies. In these cases, courts have struggled to decide whether states have constitutional standing to bring suit against the federal government. This Article fills a gap in the legal scholarship by proposing a “governance” approach to state standing that would allow states to challenge federal authority when the federal statute at issue contemplates an implementation role for state governments. The governance approach finds support both in historical precedent and in modern regulatory reality. The approach makes state-standing doctrine less susceptible to judicial manipulation and ensures that courts focus on other threshold questions often obscured by overly broad, incoherent standing analyses

Constitutional Resilience

Since the New Deal era, our system of constitutional governance has relied on expansive federal authority to regulate economic and social problems of national scale. Throughout the twentieth century, Congress passed ambitious federal statutes designed to address these problems. In doing so, it often enlisted states as regulatory partners—creating a system of shared governance that underpins major environmental statutes, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. These governance structures remain important today as we seek to adapt our laws and institutions to the serious disruptions of climate change. But recent Supreme Court decisions challenge this long-established vision of governance. This raises a critical question: How resilient is our current system of constitutional governance? Originally applied to the natural sciences, resilience theory has since inspired scholars across disciplines to think about how social-ecological systems respond to disruptive change. At the heart of resilience thinking is an attempt to balance stability with change. But as legal scholars of adaptive governance have argued, if our normative goal is to promote the resilience of ecosystems and natural resources, our system of governance must also encourage an ecological resilience that supports the flexibility and adaptive capacity of our governing institutions and laws. Not surprisingly, the adaptive governance literature focuses on democratic processes and institutions at all levels of government. Constitutional design is a background condition rather than a feature of adaptive governance or decision making. But background conditions may impede or facilitate the emergence of adaptive laws. Moreover, the judicial interpretations of these conditions are less static and therefore capable of either facilitating or hindering the adaptive capacity of institutions and laws. The premise of this Article is that constitutional governance doctrines can and should balance the stability of static rule-of-law resilience with the flexibility required for adaptive governance in a climate-disrupted world. Judicial doctrines can enhance adaptive capacity by fostering shared, overlapping governance and regulatory flexibility. Unfortunately, recent doctrinal trends threaten to hinder adaptive capacity. This Article examines some of these constraining threads, including the narrowing of Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause, the resurgence of the nondelegation doctrine, and doctrines governing state authority under the Dormant Commerce Clause

Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge

A group of environmental law professors formed the Environmental Law Collaborative with the goal of engaging environmental law scholars in the thorny issues of the day. The members of the Collaborative gathered in the summer of 2012 to produce an intensive and collective assessment of sustainability in the age of climate change. Their writings examine the process of adapting the principles and application of sustainability to the demands of climate change, including framing the term sustainability in climate change discussions; coordinating sustainable practices across disciplines such as law, economics, ethics, and the hard sciences; and conceptualizing the role of sustainability in formulating adaptation and resiliency strategies. Their work also contemplates the role of law and legal systems in crafting effective climate change adaptation strategies and considers feasible strategies in the context of specific examples

A Response to the IPCC Fifth Assessment

This collection of essays is the initial product of the second meeting of the Environmental Law Collaborative, a group of environmental law scholars that meet to discuss important and timely environmental issues. Here, the group provides an array of perspectives arising from the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Each scholar chose one passage from one of the IPCC’s three Summaries for Policymakers as a jumping-off point for exploring climate change issues and responding directly to the reports. The result is a variety of viewpoints on the future of how law relates to climate change, a result that is the product not only of each scholar’s individual knowledge but also of the group’s robust discussion

ADRA1A-Gα_q signalling potentiates adipocyte thermogenesis through CKB and TNAP

Noradrenaline (NA) regulates cold-stimulated adipocyte thermogenesis(1). Aside from cAMP signalling downstream of β-adrenergic receptor activation, how NA promotes thermogenic output is still not fully understood. Here, we show that coordinated α(1)-adrenergic receptor (AR) and β(3)-AR signalling induces the expression of thermogenic genes of the futile creatine cycle(2,3), and that early B cell factors, oestrogen-related receptors and PGC1α are required for this response in vivo. NA triggers physical and functional coupling between the α(1)-AR subtype (ADRA1A) and Gα(q) to promote adipocyte thermogenesis in a manner that is dependent on the effector proteins of the futile creatine cycle, creatine kinase B and tissue-non-specific alkaline phosphatase. Combined Gα(q) and Gα(s) signalling selectively in adipocytes promotes a continual rise in whole-body energy expenditure, and creatine kinase B is required for this effect. Thus, the ADRA1A–Gα(q)–futile creatine cycle axis is a key regulator of facultative and adaptive thermogenesis

The Ethics of Global Justice Lawyering

In the last two decades, as states, international institutions, and private donors invested heavily in the rule of law and human rights, lawyers gained a prominent place in transnational projects to reform domestic laws and institutions. As the U.S. legal profession moves into this global arena, we should pause to consider the ethical questions raised by the practices of global justice lawyering. Broadly conceived, two questions govern this inquiry: (1) What ethical justifications support the U.S. lawyer\u27s role in reforming the laws and political institutions of other societies? (2) Even if we can justify this role in theory, can we justify the particular practices of global justice lawyers? To answer the first question, I draw on the ethical doctrine of cosmopolitanism, as well as the U.S. legal profession\u27s commitments to the rule of law and reformative justice, to conclude that there are strong ethical reasons to promote global justice. These reasons do not, however, justify promotion by any means. This is the dilemma of the cosmopolitan lawyer: the cosmopolitan project of global justice - although morally justified in theory - presents ethical questions in practice. In the final section of the Article, I suggest that to avoid ethical concerns, global justice lawyers must reject an import approach to law, in which foreign laws and institutions are transplanted into new environments, in favor of a normative approach to the processes of lawmaking

Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge

A group of environmental law professors formed the Environmental Law Collaborative with the goal of engaging environmental law scholars in the thorny issues of the day. The members of the Collaborative gathered in the summer of 2012 to produce an intensive and collective assessment of sustainability in the age of climate change. Their writings examine the process of adapting the principles and application of sustainability to the demands of climate change, including framing the term sustainability in climate change discussions; coordinating sustainable practices across disciplines such as law, economics, ethics, and the hard sciences; and conceptualizing the role of sustainability in formulating adaptation and resiliency strategies. Their work also contemplates the role of law and legal systems in crafting effective climate change adaptation strategies and considers feasible strategies in the context of specific examples

Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge

A group of environmental law professors formed the Environmental Law Collaborative with the goal of engaging environmental law scholars in the thorny issues of the day. The members of the Collaborative gathered in the summer of 2012 to produce an intensive and collective assessment of sustainability in the age of climate change. Their writings examine the process of adapting the principles and application of sustainability to the demands of climate change, including framing the term sustainability in climate change discussions; coordinating sustainable practices across disciplines such as law, economics, ethics, and the hard sciences; and conceptualizing the role of sustainability in formulating adaptation and resiliency strategies. Their work also contemplates the role of law and legal systems in crafting effective climate change adaptation strategies and considers feasible strategies in the context of specific examples