Events

New Hope for Genetically-Engineered Food Labeling?

Many observers believed that the defeat of California’s Proposition 37 at the polls last November spelled a significant–and perhaps fatal–political setback for state and national efforts to require labeling of genetically engineered food products.  But two recent articles from the New York Times suggest that the GMO labeling movement is far from dead. Last week …

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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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Environmentalists Sue Over New Lake Tahoe Plan: Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good?

The Sierra Club and a local neighborhood group recently sued the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, challenging TRPA’s just-adopted Regional Plan for the Lake Tahoe Basin. That development strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive. Let me briefly explain why. The Lake Tahoe Basin, which straddles the California-Nevada border, has since 1968 been governed under a bistate Compact negotiated …

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University 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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Environmental Law and Policy Events for Couch Potatoes

UC Berkeley and UCLA School of Law’s joint Climate Change and Business Research Initiative has produced a number of public events featuring experts on pressing environmental law and policy issues. We now have on-line video recordings of many of them, for those of you who prefer not to leave the comfort of your home or …

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Previewing This Week’s Oral Arguments in the Supreme Court’s Most Important Property Rights Case This Term

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in what is shaping up as the Court’s most important property rights case of the current Term: Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, No. 11-1447.  What can we expect? Koontz is one of three Takings Clause cases on the Court’s docket this Term.  …

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Environmental Law and the Gun Debate

The horrifying events in Newtown have predictably led to calls for new gun controls, which have predictably led to push-back from gun rights advocates — some measured, some certifiable. For the most part, this debate has nothing to do with environmental law and policy, but there is an exception.  The New York Times had an …

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Today’s Supreme Court Arguments in Los Angeles County Flood Control District

  The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals got no love from either the U.S. Supreme Court or the advocates appearing before it today in Los Angeles County Flood Control District v. Natural Resources Defense Counsel.  Nor did a previously-unheard-from government actor similarly absent from the Supreme Court chambers today. Yesterday Sean Hecht posted on the …

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Supreme Court Rules Federal Flooding of State Forest Lands an Unconstitutional Taking

Today was a busy day for the environment in the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only did the justices hear arguments in a potentially-important Clean Water Act case. (More on that in a future post.) The Court also issued its first decision among the five environmental cases pending before it this Term–three of which involve property …

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Deconstructing Today’s Supreme Court Arguments in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center

Legal Planet colleague Holly Doremus did an excellent job last week of previewing today’s U.S. Supreme Court arguments in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center, a potentially important case involving the scope of  USEPA’s point source permit jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act.  But given the results of those arguments and a major, late-breaking regulatory …

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