Millions of tons of plastic enter the environment every year, killing wildlife, releasing toxins, clogging drains, and marring landscapes. Bans or restrictions on single-use plastics have exploded in popularity in recent years as a means of addressing these problems. Yet these bans remain controversial, with some businesses pushing back against what they consider excessive regulation and others maintaining that banning single-use plastics uses political capital that could be spent advancing more urgent and systemic agendas.

Do-It-Yourself biology, 3D printing, and the sharing economy are equipping ordinary people with new powers to shape their biological, physical, and social environments. This phenomenon of distributed innovation is yielding new goods and services, greater economic productivity, and new opportunities for fulfillment. Distributed innovation also brings new environmental, health, and security risks that demand oversight, yet conventional government regulation may be poorly suited to address these risks.

Cities often test the existing limits of their regulatory authority in areas like environmental protection, labor and employment, and immigration. The last few years witnessed an explosion of preemptive state legislation attacking, challenging, and overriding municipal ordinances across a wide range of policy areas. But this hostility to city government is not new. In 1915, one professor observed that “the relations of states to metropolitan cities in this country is ‘a history of repeated injuries’ .  .  .

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of some of the most creative and feasible environmental law and policy proposals from the legal academic literature each year. The pool of articles that are considered includes all environmental law articles published during the previous academic year.

Does the duty of environmental protection belong in the ethical rules for our profession? A number of scholars have explored whether lawyers should bear such duties. But little attention has focused on the possibility that “green ethics” would also be appropriate for judges. Rules of judicial ethics frame the manner in which judges take account of environmental concerns. At present, these rules provide very little guidance that is relevant to environmental matters.

Cities have become a critical source of innovation across a wide array of policy areas that advance inclusion, equitable opportunity, and social justice. In the absence of state and federal action, cities and other local governments have taken the lead in enacting minimum wage and paid sick leave policies, expanding the boundaries of civil rights, tackling public health challenges, responding to emerging environmental threats, and advancing new technologies.

Cooperative federalism can lead to more efficient and pragmatic environmental protection, and allow states to develop effective programs tailored to their needs and resources. Nevertheless, the future of the federal-state relationship in the environmental context is uncertain as state and federal priorities come into conflict: for instance, EPA’s proposal to revoke California’s authority to regulate tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases. Recent reports have begun a discussion on the future of cooperative federalism and environmental protection, but significant questions remain unanswered.