• Environmental Law Review Syndicate - Scholarship

    BioTransport: Moving Wildlife in Response to Climate Change

    By Stacy Shelton, Staff Editor, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law. This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Read the original here. “If climate change continues unabated and as rapidly as a few models predict, saving at least some species will require solutions more radical than creating parks and shielding endangered species from bullets, bulldozers, and oil spills: It will require moving them.”[1]  I. Introduction With millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from a blown-out well in the summer of 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its partners settled on a Hail…

  • Environmental Law Review Syndicate - Scholarship

    What the Supreme Court’s Stay of the Clean Power Plan Means for the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulation Moving Forward

    By Benjamin Harris* This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment. The Clean Power Plan (“CPP”), announced and promulgated in late 2015 by the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) and backed by President Barack Obama, seeks to develop a comprehensive regulatory scheme over the nation’s power plants in an effort to promote cleaner energy development and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On February 10, 2016, the Supreme Court granted a petition to stay the Clean Power Plan until a legal challenge against it can proceed on the merits. This post 1)…

  • Environmental Law Review Syndicate - Scholarship

    Clean Power Planning: Unlike with Obamacare, States are Preparing for Clean Power Plan Compliance Even as they Fight it in the Courts

    By Jennifer Golinsky, Staff Contributor, Georgetown Environmental Law Review.  This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment.   When the EPA released its draft of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) in June 2014,[1] commentators were quick to draw comparisons[2] to Obamacare (i.e., the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, hereinafter the ACA).[3] One journalist even dubbed the CPP “Obamacare for the Air” because the Clean Power Plan and the healthcare reform law are both “intensely polarizing” and “numbingly complex in an effort to ensure flexibility and fairness,…

  • Environmental Law Review Syndicate - Scholarship

    Getting to the Root of Environmental Injustice

    By Shea Diaz, Georgetown Environmental Law Review This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment. In the United States, poor people and people of color experience higher cancer rates,[1] asthma rates,[2] mortality rates,[3] and overall poorer health than their affluent and white counterparts.[4] The Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) links these health disparities to higher concentrations of environmental pollution sources in these communities.[5] This disproportionate exposure to environmental harms in low-income, minority communities is known as “environmental injustice.”[6] Since the EJM’s inception in the 1960s, empirical evidence of…

  • Scholarship

    Issue 23.3: Articles Now Available Online!

    The Articles and Note comprising ELJ’s third issue of Volume 23 are now available for online reading. Click the links below to check out our latest publication! Donald J. Kochan, Keepings Hope M. Babcock, What Can Be Done, If Anything, About the Dangerous Penchant of Public Trust Scholars to Overextend Joseph Sax’s Original Conception: Have We Produced a Bridge Too Far? Note: Yael R. Lifshitz, Winds of Change: Drawing on Water Law Doctrines to Establish Wind Law You can find the full contents of Volume 23 here.

  • Environmental Law Review Syndicate - Scholarship

    Administrative Necessity: Origin and Application to the EPA Tailoring Rule

    David Williams* This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment. In the wake of Massachusetts v. EPA,[1] the EPA fashioned new regulations to cover greenhouse gasses. As part of the new suite of regulations, the agency promulgated a “Tailoring Rule”[2] that departed from the plain text of the Clean Air Act (“CAA”).[3] The EPA justified this rule with reference to two canons of interpretation: absurd results[4] and administrative necessity.[5] The EPA describes the canon of administrative necessity as a three part test: When an agency has identified…