• 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…

  • Environmental Law Review Syndicate - Scholarship

    La Vie en Vert

    By Daniel Carpenter-Gold, Managing Editor, Harvard Environmental Law Review. This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. Click here to see the original post and leave a comment. It’s done. Like a reluctant Odysseus, we have fastened ourselves to the mast of emissions reductions with Bungee cords (not too tight, now!) and stuffed one ear full of wax—just in case those cheap, dirty fossil-fuel Sirens have something interesting to say. But what is this “Paris Agreement”? What did we promise? After some initial optimism, debate over the outcome document has been mostly about precisely what flavor of evil the…

  • Environmental Law Review Syndicate - Scholarship

    From the Well Up: A California County Confronts Fracking at the Polls

    Malia McPherson Stanford Law School, J.D. Candidate Class of 2016  This post is part of the Environmental Law Review Syndicate. To see the original post and leave a comment, click here. Introduction On November 4, 2014, the voters of San Benito County passed Measure J, a voter initiative banning hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) and all other high-intensity petroleum operations within county lines. Under California law, only a subsequent voter initiative can overrule this fracking ban. While it is not the first county or city within California to take a stand against fracking, San Benito’s path to a successful ballot initiative was…