Are Filibusters of Executive Branch Nominees Constitutional?
President Obama’s announcement today making three nominations to the National Labor Relations Board should remind us that the GOP is the party of permanent constitutional crisis. It has been quite clear from the beginning of the Obama Administration that the Republicans simply have no interest in allowing the NLRB to function. That shouldn’t be much if a surprise: it’s what you believe if you are a plutocrat. Besides, it’s nothing new: Republicans have expl...
CONTINUE READINGU.S. Bureau of Land Management Violated NEPA When Selling Oil and Gas Leases in California
On April 8, a federal magistrate judge issued the first major ruling in a California fracking lawsuit, finding that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to take the necessary “hard look” at the impact of hydraulic fracturing when it sold oil and gas leases in California. The Northern District of California court held that when BLM sold four leases in 2011 for 2,700 acres of federal land in Monte...
CONTINUE READINGBreaking News: Brown Approves California Cap-and-Trade Linkage to Quebec’s System
California Governor Jerry Brown will allow the state's Air Resources Board to link its cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a Quebec cap-and-trade program modeled after California's. Brown sent a letter to CARB today making four findings that he is required to decide before allowing the linkage to go forward. CARB must still take several steps before the systems fully link but has continually expressed its intent to expand its cap-and-trade p...
CONTINUE READINGA Unique Definition of “Interfaith”
Today in the mail appears an interesting program from the Wallage Stegner Center of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law: this coming Friday and Saturday, the Center will host "Religion, Faith, and the Environment" with lots of important guest speakers. Good on them. But then when I looked at the program, something strange popped out at me. The initial panel of the program goes from 8:15 to 11:45 (with a break), and concerns "Ecological Protection, E...
CONTINUE READINGDear Washington Post: Chesapeake Bay *is* unbalanced
An article in the Washington Post yesterday ran with the headline, "Crabs, supersized by carbon pollution, may upset Chesapeake's balance." Not to nitpick, but Chesapeake Bay is unbalanced and has been that way for well over a century. The article references some interesting research from the University of North Carolina that looks at the effects of ocean acidification on blue crab and oyster populations. Ocean acidification is the result of increased carbon levels in...
CONTINUE READINGGood environmental data matters for environmental litigation
If you aren’t reading Dave Owen’s blog posts over at Environmental Law Prof Blog, you should be. His most recent post is about a recent Endangered Species Act (ESA) case in Texas: Environmental plaintiffs sued, arguing that the state of Texas had allowed too many water withdrawals upstream from the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, a critical breeding site for the endangered whooping crane. The plaintiffs won in the district court, but Dave does a great job of ...
CONTINUE READINGMy Harvard Business Review Piece on Bullet Trains and Fiscal Tradeoffs
John Lennon sang "Imagine". In this new HBR piece, I "imagine" Philadelphia home price dynamics if an Amtrak Bullet Train reduced its time cost to Penn Station to 30 minutes. Using data from China's experience, we document empirical evidence supporting this prediction....
CONTINUE READINGPracticing Environmental Law: The World of New Lawyers
The National Council of Bar Examiners has just finished a fascinating survey of what lawyers do in their first three years of practice. Some of the most interesting findings relate to environmental law. About five percent of new lawyers report that their practice areas are environment or natural resources. As of a couple of years ago, according to the New York Times, there were 26,000 jobs for new lawyers, so apparently there were about 1300 new environmental law job...
CONTINUE READINGHow the Pacific Rivers Council case could affect environmental law
As Rick has already noted, a couple of weeks ago the Supreme Court granted cert to review the Ninth Circuit’s decision in U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council. Rick expressed pessimism about whether the Ninth Circuit’s decision would be upheld in the Supreme Court. I think he’s probably right about that, but there are different grounds upon which the Court might reverse, and it will matter a lot which grounds the Court chooses. The issues in this cas...
CONTINUE READINGFinally Cleaning Up In the Galilee
Residents of northern Israel got a welcome victory a couple of days ago: the nation's High Court held that Eitanit Construction Products, a politically well-connected firm that polluted cities across the region with asbestos, must pay half the cost of cleaning it up. Friable asbestos contaminating whole cities might be a dim memory in the United States, but in Israeli cities like Nahariya, it remains all-too-common: "As far as disease levels are concerned, Nahariya i...
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