The twentieth-century equivalent of the Holy Grail — at least in U.S. environmental law — is the status of "innocent landowner" under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act¹ (CERCLA or Superfund). Intent on preserving the fear of God, as it were, among the flock, the government argues that this exalted status is unreachable: if one finds contamination, one is no longer innocent; if one misses it, one did not look hard enough. The degree of grace associated with innocent landownership, however, continues to draw aspirants in droves, each striving to conduct "all appropriate inquiry into the previous ownership and uses of the property consistent with good commercial or customary practice."²

Given that "good commercial or customary practice" sounds, on its face at least, like something that mere mortals are capable of determining, roughly three years ago a number of interested persons formed a committee, under the aegis of the ASTM (formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials), to begin seeking redemption through their own good works, by cataloging what the phrase described. Divided equally into "producers" (mainly consultants) and "users" (mainly industrial companies, governmental entities, lenders, and insurers), the committee was inherently schismatic. One producer's perspective on the issues, midway through the process, is set out in Phillip B. Rarick's 1991 Dialogue, The Superfund Due Diligence Problem: The Flaws in an ASTM Committee Proposal and an Alternative Approach.³