Editors' Summary: At the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association, a panel convened by the Environmental Law Institute considered whether enforcement of environmental laws is declining. In his presentation as a member of that panel, the author of this Dialogue concluded that, overall, it is not.
This Dialogue contains the text of that presentation. It begins with a summary of statistics from EPA's Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Accomplishments Report for fiscal year 1997. It then discusses enforcement-related developments in different regions of the country, and examines the perceptions of experienced practitioners in those regions. Finally, it explores some enforcement-related changes that have occurred in the practice of environmental law, and considers the opportunities that these changes have created for improving environmental quality.
Nicholas C. Yost is a partner in the San Francisco office of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, where he practices environmental and natural resources law nationwide. He has served as Deputy Attorney General in charge of the Environmental Unit of the California Justice Department and as General Counsel of President Carter's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), where he had lead responsibility for drafting the CEQ National Environmental Policy Act regulations. A past chair of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Environmental Law and the California State Bar's Committee on Environment, he recently served on the California Environmental Protection Agency's Blue Ribbon Commission on a Unified Environmental Statute. He has also served on the Environmental Law Institute's Board of Directors and currently serves on its Advisory Committee. He is a graduate of Princeton University and of the School of Law of the University of California at Berkeley.
The author wishes to acknowledge those who were kind enough to share their observations with him and to thank particularly Scott Willoughby, a third-year law student at the University of California at Berkeley and a Sonnenschein summer associate, for his assistance, and Sandra Rennie, my wife, for her incisive observations.
