Editors' Summary: Since the Vietnam War, multilateral treaties and international organizations have attempted to create and implement legal provisions that would deter and redress the environmental damages of war. Unfortunately, international acceptance and enforcement of such provisions has arrived only in incremental responses to the horrors of previous wars. This Dialogue examines how the 1999 conflict in Kosovo exposed many of the current deficiencies of the legal framework addressing the environmental consequences of war.

The U.S. Supreme Court's property rights jurisprudence always has had a Delphic quality. During this century, its seminal expressions have been Justice Holmes' enigmatic "too far" language in Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon¹ and Justice Brennan's reliance on the amorphous conception of "investment-backed expectations" in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York.² The Court's 1999 decision in City of Monterey v. Del Monte Dunes at Monterey, Ltd.³ does not depart from this pattern.

During its first 15 years of existence, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sought to improve environmental quality through conventional "end-of-pipe" command and control regulation. In the late 1980s, EPA shifted to a new paradigm in environmental protection: to enhance environmental protection by encouraging "voluntary" pollution prevention. EPA believes that if companies are given the appropriate incentive they will identify the best control for the least cost.

In March of 1995, President Clinton and Vice President Gore announced 25 actions that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would take to reinvent environmental regulation.¹ These actions recognized 25 years of success achieved by our current system of environmental protection, yet acknowledged that EPA needed to better align that system with the changing world we regulate. Reinvention serves four timely and important purposes at EPA:

Editors' Summary: When the CAA was amended in 1977, the U.S. Congress imposed pollution control requirements on new stationary sources of air pollution, called new source review (NSR), but exempted existing facilities from such requirements. By creating a more favorable regulatory environment for existing facilities than for new ones, "grandfathering" creates an incentive to keep old facilities up and running. Moreover, as a command-and control program, requiring capital expenditures for pollution control equipment makes the capital sluggishness problem worse.

Editors' Summary: Poor indoor air quality is a significant, growing concern for office workers. Indoor air quality-related illnesses like sick building syndrome impose a variety of personal, economic, and legal costs on both workers and employers. In this Article, Scott Anchin argues that green building in accordance with the U.S.

Editor's Summary: The law governing off-site contamination began with common law and has grown to include federal legislation such as Superfund, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Oil Pollution Act. John Pendergrass traces the development of this area of law from its beginnings in tort and third-party liability to present-day state and federal statutes. In this Article, he offers a study of the chronology of brownfields legislation, concluding with some remarks about the future of off-site contamination law.

Editors' Summary: EPA imposes strict emissions and durability standards on vehicle manufacturers today. While these standards have become more stringent over time, the regulatory requirements for demonstrating compliance with these standards have relaxed. In this Article, Kevin L. Fast identifies and describes this relevant regulatory framework governing the reporting of emission-related component defects in North America. He provides descriptions and data on nearly 600 defect reports prepared by 6 of the largest vehicle manufacturers currently in the marketplace.

Editors' Summary: Wildlife agencies entrusted by Congress to administer the ESA have in two recent counterpart regulations revised interagency cooperation procedures in ways that appear to fall short of statutory requirements. Two federal district courts have now ruled in a contradictory manner on the validity of these regulations. Meanwhile the regulations held valid continue to be used to allow action agencies to aggrandize their role in determining whether their projects will be "not likely to adversely affect" protected species--thus receiving no further scrutiny.

Editors' Summary: NEPA, the premier U.S. environmental protection statute, was intended to confront questions of risk, harm, and uncertainty by requiring an EA before beginning certain projects. Following such assessments, project proponents may also have to prepare an EIS to identify and consider alternatives that may result in less harm to the environment.