The environmental justice movement seems to have come of age. The past two decades have seen increasing empirical evidence documenting racial disparities in sitinghazardous waste facilities and a nascent grass-roots movement bearing witness to the disproportionate effects of numerous environmental and health hazards in low-income communities of color.¹ Never have environmental justice claims been taken so seriously in environmental policymaking and adjudication than they have over the past five years.

Overview

In thoughtful dicta uttered 60 years ago, Justice Frankfurter observed that even a legislature clear as to its regulatory objectives faces hard choices in selecting remedies for the implementation of those objectives:

As we wrote last year, the U.S.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits federal agencies from providing financial assistance to recipients that commit discrimination. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Title VI regulations prohibit both intentional and unintentional discrimination by state and local agencies receiving Agency funds. However, these regulations were written before the question of environmental inequities became a serious public concern and do not explain how the Agency will define or measure adverse disparate impacts that result from a recipient's permitting decisions.

Imagine that new neighbors move in next door and begin building an addition on their home that blocks the sun, crowds your property, and obstructs you view of the park down the street. Unpleasant? Now imagine that the rights to mine the property next door—more than 8,000 acres (approximately 12 square miles)—is bought by the Arch Coal Company and that your new neighbor will soon be blasting off the tops of the surrounding mountains, cutting trees, burying the nearby streams with rubble, and killing all the wildlife in the process.

This Dialogue discusses the recent decision in Byrd v. EPA¹ regarding the scope and application of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).² According to the court's opinion, the U.S.

The standard arguments for smart growth rely on "the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant"—to quote the dictionary's definition of a euphemism.¹ "Smart growth" is, of course, itself a feel-good term. But it is by no means the only one. Almost as pervasive are terms like "sustainability" and "livable communities."² Who could be for dumb growth or think that unsustainable, unlivable places were desirable?

Several prominent academic critics of regulation, most notably Cass Sunstein and Justice Stephen Breyer, claim that our regulatory system does not establish sensible priorities.² Their reform recommendations seek to correct this problem—to get our priorities straight. What, however, precisely does it mean to say that we do not have our priorities straight? This Article develops a theoretical framework to address this question.

In the past 30 years, international environmental law has grown from an obscure field to one of the most dynamic and important areas in contemporary international law. The growth in the significance of international environmental law contrasts with the neglect experts detect in the use of international law to help protect public health.