Disaster Law

Exxon Cares!

At this point, we don’t know much about Exxon’s oil spill near Mayflower, Arkansas — especially because Exxon doesn’t seem to want to let many people look at what’s going on. Twitter to the rescue!  There’s an account called “Exxon Cares”, telling you all that you need to know, and…what’s that you say?  That’s not …

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Poll Shows Vast Majority of Americans Favor Sea-Level Rise Adaptation. Now, Time to Start Planning.

Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the Center for Ocean Solutions recently released the results of a survey finding that the majority of Americans favor proactive sea-level rise adaptation actions. According to the survey results (margin of error: +/- 4.9% at the 95 percent confidence level), 82 percent of the Americans surveyed said …

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Remedial Education for Berkeley Law Faculty

Or at least for John Yoo, who argues: Courts award damages based on the harm to the victim and the harm to society. Suppose you thought that the Iraq war was a mistake. If so, isn’t the proper remedy to restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq? If you are …

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Congress Increases Climate Research Funding!

…even if they didn’t intend to. The Republican War on Science has morphed into a more general war on knowledge.  As Dan has pointed out previously, the GOP has now declared war on social science funding, and particularly on political science. Last night, the Senate accepted the amendment of Senator Tom Coburn (R – Olduvai …

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The Ever-Growing Crisis Over the Nation’s Nuclear Waste Non-Solution

The Associated Press reports that six underground storage tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State are leaking a witches’ brew of high-level nuclear wastes into the soil that threatens regional groundwater supplies. This news highlights a crisis of national proportions that has for too long gone unaddressed. Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear …

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Can Anyone Stop the Filibuster?

The DC Circuit’s outrageous opinion on Friday essentially banning recess appointments has brought further chaos to the Age of Dysfunction.  Now, President Obama will confront potentially dozens of new filibusters without recourse; it didn’t help that less than 24 hours beforehand, the Senate scotched the efforts at meaningful filibuster reform.  So what to do now? …

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New 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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Surviving on a Changing Planet

[youtube=http://youtu.be/O5h02Yc6lfA] As this video explains, the Arctic is entering a new state, quite different from the Arctic regime that we have long known.  Over a somewhat longer time frame, much the same is happening with the climate and ecology of the world as a whole. It’s a bit like a science fiction cliché: explorers leave …

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More on BP’s guilty plea: it’s not just about the money

Cross-posted on CPRBlog. As already noted by Rick and Megan, last week BP pleaded guilty to 14 criminal counts arising from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Megan provided a good basic overview of the terms of the agreement. Here is the plea agreement itself. The amount of money BP has …

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BP Agrees to Plead Guilty to Felony Charges Arising Out of Deepwater Horizon Disaster

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that British Petroleum has agreed to plead guilty to felony charges stemming from the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 workers and precipitated the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. As part of the plea bargain, BP has agreed to pay the federal government $4.5 billion in penalties, including …

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