Academia
If the Constitution is Dead, where does that leave Takings?
Justice Scalia is getting a lot of attention for his comment that the Constitution is “dead, dead, dead”, but obviously he didn’t mean that the Constitution is no longer in effect. (See? Intent theory sometimes is helpful, Nino.). Rather, he meant that the Constitution does not have a meaning that changes over time. It has …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia’s AB32 as a Field Experiment
In modern academic economics, many scholars are running field experiments. I can point you to researchers such as John List of University of Chicago or Esther Duflo of MIT. In this 8 minute video, I sketch the simple economics of why it is very important for someone to run this field experiment for learning how …
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CONTINUE READINGUniversity of Washington Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop
The University of Washington Law School has issued a call for papers for its 2nd Annual UW Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop. The workshop will be held July 10-12, 2013, on the UW campus in Seattle. Here’s their description of the event: This collegial two-day workshop features discussion of works-in-progress by ten early career environmental …
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CONTINUE READINGNapoleon Bonaparte, Zoning Administrator
This semester, I am teaching Land Use, and in the casebook I came across this evocative and meaningful quote from Tony Arnold: The real law of land use regulation exists mostly in zoning codes and regulatory procedures, as well as in the actions or decisions of local land use regulatory bodies. Consider all the zoning, …
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CONTINUE READINGAn Introduction to Environmental Economics
I’m a quirky teacher. I don’t use textbooks and I try to focus on real world examples. Here are 30 short videos about environmental economics. Here are all of my course materials for my Winter 2013 Environmental Economics undergraduate course at UCLA. I focus on incentives and empirical hypothesis testing.
CONTINUE READINGTheda Skocpol on Federal Carbon Policy Design
Harvard’s Theda Skocpol provides a compelling narrative and analysis of why Waxman-Markey didn’t become law. In terms of my own empirical work, Kotchen and I document using Google Trends that interest in “global warming” fell in states with rising unemployment rates. Gurney, Zhou, Michael Cragg and I document that Conservative Representatives from high carbon and …
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CONTINUE READINGHow the EPA Saved America
If you don’t follow political blogs, you may not have noticed Kevin Drum’s outstanding story about how the decrease in crime over the last 20 years can largely be attributed to the sharp drops in lead ingestion. When I first heard the theory, I thought it was too good to be true, but Kevin’s story …
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CONTINUE READINGNew Symposium on Disaster Law
The Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum has just published a great symposium on disaster law. The authors include some leading lights in environmental law, and for good reason, since disaster issues and environmental law are closely related. Here are links to all of the individual articles: Articles Introduction: Legal Scholarship, the Disaster Cycle, and …
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CONTINUE READINGWhy Monitoring Matters
There’s been a lot of discussion here about the failings of the latest Supreme Court environmental decision in Los Angeles County Flood Control District v. NRDC. I don’t really want to pile on with those criticisms – though it is baffling to me that the Court wasted its very limited judicial resources correcting the Ninth …
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CONTINUE READINGDarwin and Climate Change Adaptation
The Stanford Press Office has released a blurb about new research examining what types of coral are most nimble in adapting to climate change. In the case of humans, it is self evident that more educated, higher income people and nations will have an easier time adapting to climate change. If we anticipate this …
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