Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court raises a question for environmental lawyers: What perspectives and predilections with regard to environmental litigation would he bring to the Court? This Comment reflects on Judge Garland’s environmental law opinions in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C.) Circuit: his opinions for the court, his dissents, and his concurrences.

In their book Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the “War on Coal,” Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke detail the history of the Clean Air Act and the political compromises that led to exempting existing power plants from significant portions of the Act’s regulatory authority.

India’s National Green Tribunal (NGT) was established by statute in October 2010 “for effective and expeditious disposal of cases relating to environmental protection and conservation of forests and other natural resources including enforcement of any legal right relating to environment and giving relief and compensation for damages to persons and property and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.” The intent was to create a “specialized body equipped with necessary expertise to handle environmental disputes involving multi-disciplinary issues.” To this end, the guiding lig

EPA’s operating budgets and staff size are at historically low levels, and the volume of its facility inspections and civil enforcement cases has dropped. The enforcement resources available to state environmental agencies have also declined considerably. At the same time, the regulatory and enforcement responsibilities of both EPA and state agencies have expanded significantly.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) makes it a crime to “knowingly” take any member of an endangered species. The government has generally interpreted this to require the defendant’s knowledge of each of the elements of the offense; however, it has not been consistent in this interpretation. In several cases, it has argued that the defendant need only have knowingly engaged in an act that resulted in take, and that knowledge that a particular species will be taken is unnecessary. This Article argues that the statute requires knowledge of all the facts, including the identity of the species.

As the world begins implementing the Paris Agreement, Canada and the United States remain without comprehensive greenhouse gas regimes at the federal level; most action has taken place at the subnational level. At the forefront is the California-Quebec cap-and-trade market linkage. Close examination of this example demonstrates that such linkages are susceptible to constitutional constraints on both sides of the border.

For over 30 years, the United States has deployed an effective set of policies to promote energy efficiency, including appliance standards, information disclosure requirements, auto fuel economy standards, building codes, and tax rebates. From 1980 to 2014, the energy intensity of the U.S. economy declined by about 50%—a remarkable success story. Energy efficiency policies and technologies were responsible for a substantial portion of that decline. Climate and energy experts are now calling for the near-complete decarbonization of the U.S.

Investors, regulators, and shareholders have shown increasing interest in the information that corporations do and do not disclose about potential climate risks. Legal requirements in this area are complex, governed by an amalgam of securities laws dating back to the 1920s, state anti-fraud statutes, and more recent guidance and voluntary practices specific to climate risk. On March 17, 2016, the Energy Bar Association’s Environmental Regulation Committee convened a panel of expert practitioners to discuss these issues.

This Article examines how the Latin American procedure of “popular consultation” has been used as a mechanism for resisting the development of an open-pit gold mine in Colombia, and analyzes how Colombian communities are using the procedure to have meaningful involvement in environmental decisionmaking. A close study suggests that communities were able to engage in popular consultation because of certain conditions: First, most of Colombian society was aware of this participatory mechanism being written into the 1991 Constitution.

Colleges and universities that seek sustainability have a wide range of support organizations to draw upon for advice and tools. Such schools can also learn by studying the best sustainability operating system (SOS) practices adopted by their fellow collegiate institutions. The encouraging news is that some of these institutions are well on the way to establishing comprehensive, well-integrated sustainability programs. This Article, adapted from Chapter 15 of The Sustainability Handbook, 2nd Ed.