Just under 14 years ago, at a few minutes after midnight on Halloween, a fire broke out in Sandoz Warehouse 956 in Schweizerhalle, near Basel, Switzerland. The fire and subsequent fire-fighting efforts resulted in the discharge of 1,351 metric tons of chemicals, many of them toxic, into the Rhine. At the time, the Sandoz spill was considered Europe's worst environmental disaster in decades, and perhaps its worst watercourse disaster ever.

The principle of deterrence underlies the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's or the Agency's) compliance monitoring and enforcement program.¹ It is referenced expressly in virtually every EPA enforcement response and penalty policy,² and endorsed in EPA Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) penalty decisions.³ The U.S.

Environmental lawyers have much to learn from a close study of the March 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Food & Drug Administration v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp.¹ So much of the U.S. regulatory apparatus controlling environmental pollution is premised on administrative agency power to fill gaps in statutory language, that the 5-4 majority's dramatic slalom turn away from prior Supreme Court norms of deference² bears close attention.

On January 1, 1970, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into law.¹ The enactment of NEPA was the result of a confluence of numerous factors, and two among these were the Torrey Canyon oil spill of March 18, 1967, and the Santa Barbara oil well blowout of January 30, 1969.² Twenty years later, on August 18, 1990, President Bush signed the Oil Pollution Act (OPA)³ into law.

The law of standing to intervene in administrative proceedings has long been something of a stepchild of the law of standing to be heard in court. The recent decision of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Envirocare of Utah, Inc. v. NRC¹ may, however, have brought administrative standing out of the shadow of its more prominent relation.

For much of the last century, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) has had a quiet yet significant role in the development of American law. Founded in 1900, the Association is composed of 162 U.S. law schools, each of whose faculty members are AALS members. The Association sponsors a number of events annually, the most significant of which is its annual meeting, at the beginning of January, which typically attracts between 3,500 and 4,000 participants.¹

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR), in general, is a hot topic. None other than Attorney General Janet Reno observed that:

[An important] component of problem-solving requires us to place an even greater emphasis on negotiation, dispute resolution and collaborative working relationships. Students need to learn in negotiation courses about the obstacles to negotiated agreement and the means for overcoming them.¹

"Environmental justice" means many things to many people. To local communities feeling overburdened by environmental hazards and left out of the decisionmaking process, it captures their sense of the unfairness of the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws and policies. To regulated entities facing allegations that they have created or contributed to injustices, environmental justice is an amorphous term that wrongly suggests racial-based or class-based animus or, at the very least, indifference to the public health and welfare of distressed communities.

Lake Sevan is land-locked Armenia's chief water resource. The largest alpine lake in the Caucasus, Lake Sevan's catchment basin is one-sixth of Armenia's total geography. Almost one-half of the fish for the kitchens of Armenia come from Lake Sevan. Lake Sevan is a source of recreation, hydropower, croplands irrigation, habitat for fish and shellfish, nursery zones for aquatic and amphibian species, and a resting place for migratory birds. Not surprisingly, the lake figures importantly in Armenia history, literature, and culture.

I suspect that many readers are unfamiliar with the concept of, evidence for, or implications of, the biological principle of hormesis.¹ This is a shame, insofar as environmental policy purports to be based on scientific evidence.² There is a substantial body of evidence behind the theory that even very hazardous substances have a hormetic pattern of effects—that is, they may be beneficial to health at very low levels of exposure.