Now We\u27re Cooking!: Adding Practical Application to the Recipe for Teaching Sustainability

This essay explores the benefits and challenges presented by incorporating experiential learning into the Drake University Law School course, Sustainability & Its Application. The course combined academic inquiry with actual, practical experience to facilitate student professional development, enhance practice skills, and explore a new and rapidly developing area of law concerning sustainability. This essay provides the core details of the course, and hopefully serves as a guideline for similar courses

Fifty Shades of Gray Infrastructure: Land Use and the Failure to Create Resilient Cities

Land use laws, such as comprehensive plans, site plan reviews, zoning, and building codes, greatly affect community resilience to climate change. One often-overlooked area of land use law that is essential to community resilience is the regulation of infrastructure on private property. These regulations set standards for infrastructure built by private developers. Such infrastructure is completed in conjunction with millions of commercial and residential projects and is necessary for critical services, including potable water and energy distribution. Throughout the fifty states, these land use laws regulating infrastructure constructed by private developers encourage or compel “gray infrastructure.” Marked by human-made, engineered solutions, including pipes, culverts, and detention basins, gray infrastructure reflects a desire to control, remove, and manipulate ecosystems. Left untouched, these ecosystems often provide critical services that strengthen a community’s resilience to disasters and slow changes. This Article describes the current state of land use laws and their focus on human-engineered, gray infrastructure developed as part of private projects. It explores how that infrastructure is reducing community resilience to change. By creatively combining human-engineered solutions with ecosystem services already available and by incorporating adaptive governance into the regulation of infrastructure erected by private parties, this Article describes how land use laws can enhance community resilience. The Article concludes with several examples where land use laws are relied upon to help build cost-effective, adaptive infrastructure to create more resilient communities

Outsourced Emissions: Why Local Governments Should Track and Measure Consumption- Based Greenhouse Gases

While many local governments track greenhouse gas ( GHG ) emissions, almost all of them exclude most GHGs associated with consumption. These consumption-based emissions stem from the lifecycle production, pre-purchase transportation, sale, and disposal of goods, food, and services produced outside of a local jurisdiction but consumed inside the jurisdiction. Based on the limited data measuring extraterritorial emissions, these consumption-based emissions amount to more than half-and in some places more than threefourths- of GHG emissions directly connected to local consumption patterns and behaviors. This Article argues that local governments should track and measure these pervasive GHGs. Doing so may unlock meaningful information about our carbon footprint that can be leveraged to build more effective climate mitigation strategies. This Article is most concerned with how the dramatic undercounting of GHG emissions at the local level and the proliferation of GHG emissions associated with consumption can lead to both under- and over-regulation at the local level. This Article argues that local governments should track and measure consumption-based GHGs for four reasons. First, given the * voluminous amount of GHGs associated with urban consumption, there are significant opportunities to mitigate GHG emissions. In order to do so, local communities must have the correct information. Second, failing to measure these GHGs can lead to inaccurate and inefficient regulation. Third, regulating GHGs in the absence of consumption-based information may penalize local production. Finally, measuring local consumption-based GHGs may provide the necessary information leading to more politically feasible and equitable regulation. In conclusion, tracking and measuring consumption- based GHGs at the local level should be part of any meaningful GHG reduction strategy

Exploring Methods to Improve Management and Fairness in Pro Se Cases: A Study of the Pro Se Docket in the Southern District of New York

This Article describes a study done in the Southern District of New York on pro se cases. Part I details the lack of current data and the methods used in the study. Part II provides the results of the study amd attempts to identify the areas of pro se litigation in which litigants are faced with the most problems and where improvement is needed. It also discusses the effects of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. Part III suggests a plan that will help courts run more smoothly in assisting pro se litigants

Uncommon Approaches to Commons Problems: Nested Governance Commons and Climate Change

Natural capital resources crucial to combatting climate change are potentially subject to tragic overconsumption absent a requisite degree of vertical government regulation of resource appropriators and/or horizontal collective action among resource appropriators. In federal systems, these vertical and horizontal approaches may (or may not) take place in any one of four scales — local, state, national, and global — “nested” one within another. Prior research has described how natural capital in federal systems of government, though privatized and/or subject to government regulation, may nonetheless remain in a tragic plight due to the allocation of governance authority in federal systems — an allocation that may or may not legally entrench the commons dynamic. This Article builds on that research to present a clearer picture of the complexity of natural capital resource commons and does so by first deconstructing the nested commons scales and describing for the first time a number of legal authority and political action scenarios that may either resolve natural capital commons dilemmas or facilitate commons tragedies within the scales of a federal governance structure. The Article then details the “divergent” vertical regulatory and horizontal collective action approaches to managing climate-crucial natural capital within each scale. The Article concludes by pointing toward future scholarship exploring how these “divergent” approaches within scales can become “convergent” by taking into account both legal constraints that may exist on vertical regulation across scales or horizontal collective action within scales as well as geopolitical circumstances positively or negatively impacting political action within scales. This convergent approach encourages the proper management of natural capital resources by more fully accounting for the complexities of the federal governance commons

Clinical Diagnosis of Placenta Accreta and Clinicopathological Outcomes

Objective To investigate the association between the intraoperative diagnosis of placenta accreta at the time of cesarean hysterectomy and pathological diagnosis. Study Design This is a retrospective cohort study of all patients undergoing cesarean hysterectomy for suspected placenta accreta from 2000 to 2016 at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The primary outcome was the presence of invasive placentation on the pathology report. We estimated predictive characteristics of clinical diagnosis of placenta accreta using pathological diagnosis as the correct diagnosis. Results There were 50 cesarean hysterectomies performed for suspected abnormal placentation from 2000 to 2016. Of these, 34 (68%) had a diagnosis of accreta preoperatively and 16 (32%) were diagnosed intraoperatively at the time of cesarean delivery. Two patients had no pathological evidence of invasion, corresponding to a false-positive rate of 4% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.5%, 13.8%) and a positive predictive value of 96% (95% CI: 86.3%, 99.5%). There were no differences in complications among patients diagnosed intraoperatively compared with those diagnosed preoperatively. Conclusion Most patients undergoing cesarean hysterectomy for placenta accreta do have this diagnosis confirmed on pathology. However, since the diagnosis of placenta accreta was made intraoperatively in nearly a third of cesarean hysterectomies, intraoperative vigilance is required as the need for cesarean hysterectomy may not be anticipated preoperatively

Experience in Implementing Inpatient Clinical Note Capture via a Provider Order Entry System

Care providers' adoption of computer-based health-related documentation ("note capture”) tools has been limited, even though such tools have the potential to facilitate information gathering and to promote efficiency of clinical charting. The authors have developed and deployed a computerized note-capture tool that has been made available to end users through a care provider order entry (CPOE) system already in wide use at Vanderbilt. Overall note-capture tool usage between January 1, 1999, and December 31, 2001, increased substantially, both in the number of users and in their frequency of use. This case report is provided as an example of how an existing care provider order entry environment can facilitate clinical end-user adoption of a computer-assisted documentation tool—a concept that may seem counterintuitive to som

Amici Curiae Brief of the International Municipal Lawyers Association and Legal Scholars in Support of Defendants-Appellees in Portland Pipe Line Corporation, et al. v. City of South Portland, et al.

This brief to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court was filed in support of the City of South Portland by the Amici Curiae, including the International Municipal Lawyers Association and legal scholars, to provide the Court with a background on the role of local governments in land use planning, and to explain why the City of South Portland’s Clear Skies Ordinance falls easily within the City’s authority and was not preempted by state legislation.After studying the potential for bulk loading of crude oil within its boundaries, the City of South Portland concluded that the infrastructure requirements and environmental impacts of the activity posed a threat to public health and welfare and were incompatible with the community’s vision of itself for the future. The City therefore decided to enact the Clear Skies Ordinance, which prohibits the storing and handling of petroleum or petroleum products for the bulk loading of crude oil onto any marine tank vessel in specified zoning districts. Litigation followed, with plaintiffs arguing that the City lacked authority to enact the Ordinance and that, even if it had such authority in the first instance, that authority had been preempted by other state law. Defendants prevailed on summary judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, and during the course of an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, the Circuit certified several questions to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. This brief was filed in support of the City with regard to those certified questions.The brief begins by discussing how central the role of local governments is in making land use decisions, emphasizing the highly localized impacts of land use decisions for public health and welfare. It then describes the zoning mechanisms by which local governments exercise their land use power, and discusses why the zoning power is so important for protecting public health and environmental quality, and responding to the changing needs of communities.Next, the brief explains the legal underpinnings of the City of South Portland’s home rule authority. The Constitution of the State of Maine contains a broad grant of home rule authority that is further strengthened by a statutorily imposed rebuttable presumption of validity for exercises of that authority. Local exercises of zoning authority are consistent within this home rule grant, and the brief discusses why the Clear Skies Ordinance falls squarely within the local zoning power. Finally, the brief explains why the Ordinance has not been expressly or impliedly preempted by state law. For all of those reasons, the brief concludes that the City’s enactment of the Ordinance was valid in the first instance and should not be overturned