Notwithstanding that only a few agencies use regulatory negotiation¹ for a tiny minority of rules, the process attracts a remarkable amount of scholarly attention. While proponents claim that negotiation improves rule quality, reduces transaction costs, and increases legitimacy, critics contend that the process fails to deliver its purported benefits and abrogates an agency's responsibility to execute its delegated functions.

Anna Weiland was proud of herself. For the first time in her 43 years, she became involved with local government, speaking out for her rights, filing a complaint. . . . Red Canyon Quarry then filed a lawsuit against Weiland. . . . Weiland says she learned a hard lesson. . . .¹

The Pitfalls of Cross-Cultural Legal Capacity Building

The use of default assumptions in risk assessment originated in unusual conditions. In the early 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon had declared a war on cancer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was a new agency created to deal with environmental hazards. While cancer was a well-known problem, scientific understanding of its causes were limited, and experimental methods were in an early stage of development.

The process of protecting the environment is big business. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now the federal government's largest regulatory agency, with 18,000 employees and a budget of $ 7.8 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2001. Complying with the laws and regulations that EPA is charged with upholding is even bigger business.

"The Everglades is our mother, she is dying, and she is in the care of others who do not care."

—Billy Cypress, Chairman

Miccosukee Indian Tribe, July 31, 1993¹

"Their culture has survived because of an ability and will to endure and fight and hide in an inhospitable and trackless reach of swamp and marsh where heat and humidity, deer flies and mosquitos, and the tall, razor-edged sedge called sawgrass all became their formidable allies; it persists because of an unrelenting mistrust of the white man."

Congressional efforts to control the actions of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA or the Agency) have dominated much of the Agency's history. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Congress cast itself in the role of EPA watchdog—acting to ensure that the Agency carried out environmental laws, often in conflict with Administration officials seen as unsympathetic to those laws.

Garden

Strange

Distorted blades of grass,

Strange

Distorted trees,

Strange

Distorted tulips

On their knees.¹

I. The Importance of Methanex v. United States to American States

In 1998, faced with mounting evidence that many eastern and midwestern states could not comply with national air quality standards for ozone (O₃) pollution due, in part, to emissions originating in upwind states,¹ the U.S.