Supreme Court Sides With Property Owners in Wetlands Dispute With USEPA
The U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the most closely watched environmental case on the Court's docket this Term: Sackett v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. As expected following an especially lively set of oral arguments in the Sackett case earlier this year, the justices ruled--unanimously--in favor of the private property owners who had brought this litigation under the wetlands provisions of the Clean Water Act, and against EPA. The facts giving rise ...
CONTINUE READINGAttack of the Dim Bulbs (A Dismayingly On-Going Series)
And the government would have banned Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Oh yeah, Obama’s regulators actually did just that. That was Governor Romney on March 19. I hope he was more careful with the facts when he worked for Bain. If not, he would have cost lost a lot of money, not to mention the liability risks. Here's what the Washington Post fact-checker says about Romney's statement: It’s a cheap political shot for Romney to blame “Obama’s regulators” for a p...
CONTINUE READINGSuperman and the Rational Actor Model
Via Jeff Weintraub. Contrary to popular belief on the right, this version of Superman does not resemble Paul Ryan physically. Only morally.... ...
CONTINUE READINGJeremy Bentham and Polar Bears
Over at the Reality-Based Community, my co-blogger James Wimberley rightfully takes to task a right-wing economist named Karl Smith for what Wimberley calls the dumbest blog post of 2011. Smith essentially seems to argue that it's okay to cause hundreds of species to become extinct because it will increase aggregate wealth in the short run. In doing so, James makes a point so gobsmackingly obvious that it is somewhat embarrassing that I had never thought of it bef...
CONTINUE READINGLaw Schools in the Public Interest: Environmental Programs in the South
I've been struck by how much environmental law programs are doing to advance the public interest. Without purporting to do a complete survey, I thought it would still be illuminating to provide five or ten examples from different parts of the country. Today, I'm going to start with the South. Although the South is probably the area of the country least identified with environmental protection, there's still a lot of public interest work to talk about. These exampl...
CONTINUE READINGDeep Waters
Dean Rowan pointed me to a nifty interactive site dealing with sea level change. It covers the entire coastal U.S. You simply put in the name or zip code of the place your interested in, along with the amount of sea level rise (1-10 feet). You get a map of what parts of the city have a greater than 1 in 6 chance of flooding due to storm surges. Out of curiosity, I checked out the map for Oakland. The Oakland airport appears to go under water very quickly. On t...
CONTINUE READING“Female Roommate Wanted”
It’s a fairly standard advertisement. But for years, many scholars and lawyers have thought it constitutes illegal sex discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. In Fair Housing Council v. roommate.com, a recent opinion by Alex Kozinski and joined by Stephen Reinhardt (so there's your first surprise), the 9th Circuit has said that such ads are permissible. I realize that this isn't strictly an environmental question, but the case is interesting for the creati...
CONTINUE READINGEnergy Scholarship Symposium in the Journal of Economic Perspectives
As I argued about three months ago, the Journal of Economic Perspectives ought to be on the regular reading for anyone interested in environmental law and policy. The most recent quarter's issue shows why: it features a fascinating symposium on "Energy Challenges". Not all of the articles will be music to environmentalists' ears: for example, the Allcott and Greenstone piece, which I am currently working through, suggests that attempts to increase energy efficiency w...
CONTINUE READINGMonsieur Fouche, Meet Professor Gleick
By now, Peter Gleick's ethical indiscretions concerning the Heartland Institute are old news. But for lawyers, they raise particularly interesting ethical issues because they highlight the question of really, whether there were ethical barriers broached at all. I initially thought that this was obviously the case: someone in my profession would get disbarred for doing something similar, I assumed. But actually, it is somewhat murkier than that. Consider the issue...
CONTINUE READINGA Post Script to Steve’s Post about the Nuclear Renaissance
This just in from the NY Times: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said a June breaker fire at the 478-megawatt Fort Calhoun nuclear plant was of "high safety significance," increasing work the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) must complete before the troubled unit can restart. The NRC's preliminary "red" safety violation, the agency's most serious classification, is the second for a U.S. reactor in as many years... Fort Calhoun shut 11 months ago for a month-long ref...
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