Gina McCarthy to be nominated as EPA head
As predicted by Cara recently in this space, it's being widely reported (for example here) this morning that Gina McCarthy, currently EPA's Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, is Obama's pick to succeed Lisa Jackson as EPA Administrator. Cara sees this appointment as a good thing for EPA's climate policy efforts and efforts to work with states like California, which of course is playing its own important role in climate policy. I agree. I would ...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Law and the Two-Year Law Degree
There's been talk recently about requiring lawyers to have only two years of law school, maybe with a follow-on year of apprenticeship. If this change takes place, will students still be able to study specialized courses like environmental law? For instance, to get an environmental law certificate at Berkeley, at student needs to take six courses in environmental law or related areas. What happens to specialized courses like these in a "two-year degree" world? Does...
CONTINUE READINGThe Future of Los Angeles and Climate Change
On Wednesday Night, I will participate in a KPCC discussion focused on climate change's impacts on Southern California. The rest of the panel includes Jerry R. Schubel and my friend Jonathan Parfrey. What do I want to talk about? I wouldn't mind promoting my Climatopolis but here is a sketch of my thoughts; We control our destiny but we need a new zoning code that encourages densification in safer, more temperate parts of the metro area. Put bluntly, Sa...
CONTINUE READINGDid the Supreme Court just shut the courthouse door on environmental plaintiffs?
It’s not an environmental law case, but the Supreme Court’s decision in Clapper v. Amnesty International has a lot of environmental law folks talking. Clapper was a lawsuit that sought to challenge the constitutionality of a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allowed the government to monitor a range of communications by foreign citizens outside of the United States. The plaintiffs in Clapper were US citizens who argued that FISA s...
CONTINUE READINGD.C. Circuit Affirms Polar Bear Listing
In an opinion released earlier today, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected challenges to the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Read the full opinion, In re: Polar Bear Endangered Species Act Listing and Section 4(d) Rule Litigation - MDL No. 1993. Holly has discussed the ongoing litigation over the polar bear listing in depth here and here. As I mentioned in a previous post, the polar bear is one ...
CONTINUE READINGThe US wins the latest round in the Casitas saga
In 2008, the Federal Circuit surprised a lot of legal academics by ruling that the Casitas Municipal Water District's takings claim, which arose from a requirement that the district construct and operate a fish ladder to allow endangered steelhead to pass its diversion dam, should be analyzed using the physical takings test. That didn't resolve the case, because the District had not yet established that it had any property right. The US had conditionally accepted the Dis...
CONTINUE READINGThe First Day of Spring, 2013
...was today, February 28th. At least in my non-scientific, highly qualitative opinion. When I was in college during the 1980's, spring break occurred during the second and third weeks of March. I would fly back to Los Angeles from New England, to be greeted by a southern California winter, which of course wasn't much of a winter at all: cool and temperate, not cold at all, but not warm, either. Something always happened, however, during the third week of March. During...
CONTINUE READINGDoes the President Even Need the Senate to Confirm Appointees?
Damn. I suppose that it's an occupational hazard of law professors that they kick around an idea, only to find that someone has beaten them to the punch. Well, Harvard's Matthew Stephenson has done that to me, sort of, with an essay in the most recent volume of the Yale Law Journal entitled, Can the President Appoint Principal Executive Officers Without a Senate Confirmation Vote? Here's the abstract: It is generally assumed that the Constitution requires the ...
CONTINUE READINGWho Is Ernest Moniz?
And why should you care? Moniz is a nuclear physics professor at MIT, the director of the MIT energy project, and at least according to a lot of reports, President Obama's first choice to head the Energy Department. Anything not to like about that? Well, lots of environmentalists don't seem to. The Daily Beast reports that "environmental organizations are girding for a fight over a Moniz appointment. The objection seems to be that Moniz has in the past, advoca...
CONTINUE READINGNewsflashes from the B-School
You might think that business schools would take the same views of policy as the Chamber of Commerce, but that's not necessarily true. The Haas School here at Berkeley has a very interesting energy blog. I don't always find their conclusions congenial but they're always interesting. Here are some recent posts: Information and energy use. This post reports a study showing that consumers respond vigorously to improved information about the costs of energy use. V...
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