Capturing Individual Harms

The aggregated lifestyles and behaviors of individuals impose significant environmental harms yet remain largely unregulated. A growing literature recognizes the environmental significance of individual behaviors, critiques the failure of environmental law and policy to capture harms traceable to individual behaviors, and suggests and evaluates strategies for capturing individual harms going forward. This Article contributes to the existing literature by approaching the problem of environmentally significant individual harms through the lens of environmental federalism. Using climate change and individual greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions as an exemplar, the Article illustrates how local information, local governments, and local implementation can enhance policies designed to capture individual environmental harms. Local information and community-level implementation may enhance norm management efforts designed to influence GHG-emitting behaviors by (1) allowing for the identification of concrete behaviors that are feasible to target through norm management in a given community; (2) informing the design and content of norm campaigns, including the selection of the abstract norm that will form the basis of the appeal for specific behavioral change; and (3) facilitating effective implementation strategies. This framework supports a preference for local action expressed, but to date largely unexamined, in the broader norm management literature. Additionally, the Article argues that obstacles to using mandates to influence GHG-emitting behaviors may be less formidable when mandates are developed and enforced locally. Local development and enforcement of mandates can reduce intrusion objections because (1) individuals are accustomed to local control over day-to-day behaviors; (2) familiarity with local attitudes and practices enables the design of mandates that avoid intrusion objections; and (3) local governments are in a better position to structure time, place, and manner restrictions that channel behavior while preserving some individual choice. Local design and enforcement of mandates may also minimize the key enforcement challenges of expense, numerosity, and (in)visibility

Accessing Law: An Empirical Study Exploring the Influence of Legal Research Medium

The legal profession is presently engaged in an uncontrolled experiment. Attorneys now locate and access legal authorities primarily through electronic means. Although this shift to an electronic research medium radically changes how attorneys discover and encounter law, little empirical work investigates impacts from the shift to an electronic medium. This Article presents the results of one of the most robust empirical studies conducted to date comparing research processes using print and electronic sources. While the study presented in this Article was modest in scope, the extent and type of the differences that it reveals are notable. Some of the observed differences between print and electronic research processes confirm predictions offered, but never before confirmed, about how the research medium changes the research process. This Article strongly supports calls for the legal profession and legal academy to be more attentive to the implications of the shift to electronic research

Foreword: Energy and the Environment: Empowering Consumers

The conference Energy and the Environment: Empowering Consumers brought together legal scholars, attorneys, scientists, philosophers, journalists, sociologists, elected representatives, and agency experts. This symposium issue of the Hofstra Law Review presents a selection of papers from conference participants that, together, illustrate some of the opportunities, challenges, and diverse questions that arise in the effort to deploy energy and environmental law and policy to embrace individual consumers and combat climate change

Using Local Knowledge to Shrink the Individual Carbon Footprint

Entire texts have been devoted to exploring the meaning of the term “lifestyle” and sociological understandings of lifestyle are complex and nuanced.For present purposes, however, a more simple articulation of the term will suffice. Lifestyle can mean “mode of living,” including “patterns of action” and “patterns of ways of living.” Without rendering judgment, one observation that can fairly be made about the current lifestyles and associated behaviors of Americans is that they indirectly and directly lead to the emission of a high volume of greenhouse gases (“GHGs”).7 Although an American diplomat is said to have remarked in preparing for the Rio Earth Summit that “‘the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation,”’ a growing number of legal scholars recognize the need for environmental policy to capture individual GHG emissions, and have begun to explore whether and how the law can or should be used to change individual, GHG-emitting lifestyles and behaviors. One consideration in designing a policy aimed at individual, GHG-emitting behaviors will be the division of authority between different levels of government. As evidenced by the opening quotations, local governments are often characterized as well-situated to influence individual behavior, particularly GHG-emitting behaviors. This Idea links concepts developed in the environmental federalism literature with work discussing the use of law to influence environmental behaviors to consider the competence of local governments with respect to influencing individual, GHG-emitting lifestyle and behavior choices

Electronically Manufactured Law

This Article seeks to strengthen the case for the academy and the legal profession to pay heed to the consequences of the shift to electronic research, primarily by employing cognitive psychology to guide predictions about the impacts of the shift and, thereby, address a perceived credibility gap. This credibility gap arises from the difficulty and imprecision in postulating how changes in the research process translate into changes in researcher behavior and research outcomes. Applying principles of cognitive psychology to compare the print and electronic research processes provides an analytical basis for connecting changes in the research process with changes in researcher behavior and research outcomes. Cognitive psychology generates two specific predictions about how electronic research will change the law. First, electronic research will lead to increased diversity in framing -- divergence in the selection of the legal theory or theories through which to conceptualize facts, arguments, and cases. Second, electronic research will lead to more tilting at windmills -- the advancement of marginal cases, theories, and arguments. The Article explores how an increase in diversity in framing and tilting at windmills could affect the legal profession and the law. For example, in an adversarial system, judicial options for case resolution are largely defined and constrained by the theories proffered by counsel. Diversity in framing could expand judicial authority by providing judges with a wider variety of options for dispute resolution. This underlines the way in which counsel serve as gatekeepers by exercising judgment about which cases and theories have sufficient merit to warrant pursuit. Increased tilting at windmills may require recalibration of the existing limits placed on lawyers in their role as gatekeepers. Recalibration may be necessary to prevent the dedication of client and judicial resources to lost causes spurred by lapses in judgment related to electronic research and to allow attorneys to advance, without fear of sanctions, thoughtful arguments designed to push doctrinal boundaries. Specifically, Part II reviews existing legal theory, scholarship, and data that suggest that the shift to electronic research will likely have broad-ranging impacts. Part III compares print and electronic research and discusses three particularly salient changes in research process: (1) electronic researchers are not guided by the key system to the same extent as print researchers when identifying relevant theories, principles, and cases; (2) electronic researchers do not encounter and interpret individual cases through the lens of key system information to the same extent as print researchers; and (3) electronic researchers are exposed to more and different case texts than print researchers. Part IV uses principles of cognitive psychology to examine these process differences and predict two major non-process consequences of the shift to electronic research: increased diversity in framing and tilting at windmills. Part V concludes by assessing the broader significance of these hypothesized consequences

Women?s health in mid-life: life course social roles and agencyas quality

Data from a prospective British birth cohort study showed that women who were childless, lone mothers or full-timehomemakers between the ages of 26 and 54 were more likely to report poor health at age 54 than women who occupiedmultiple roles between these ages. To explain this finding we developed and tested a theory of role quality based on theconcept of agency by drawing on Giddens? theory of structuration and Doyal and Gough?s theory of human needs.According to our theory, the patriarchal structuration (drawing on Giddens? term) of work and family roles provides bothlimitation and opportunity for the expression of agency. Doyal and Gough?s theory of human needs was then used toidentify the restriction of agency as a possible influence on health. This theory of role quality was operationalised using ameasure of work (paid and unpaid) quality at age 36 and a measure of work and family stress between ages 48 and 54. Therelatively poor subjective health in mid-life of lone mothers was explained by work and family stress and adult social class.In contrast, the poor health in mid-life of long-term homemakers and childless women was less easily explained.Homemaker?s excess risk of reporting poor health at age 54 remained strong and significant even after adjusting for rolequality and socioeconomic indicators, and childless women were at an increased risk of reporting poor health despite thesocial advantage inherent in attaining educational qualifications and occupying professional or managerial occupations.This study highlights the need to develop measures of role quality specifically designed to capture agency aspects of socialroles