Editors' Summary: Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (Defenders), the Supreme Court's June 1992, decision limiting environmentalists' standing to challenge agency programs, envisions judges' roles in environmental law strikingly different than the roles judges have often played before. Justice Scalia's plurality opinion articulates a limited role for the judiciary, anchored in the belief that government's programmatic decisions and rules of general application are normally inappropriate for judicial review.

Editors' Summary: CERCLA § 107(e) recognizes that private parties may agree to limit or to insure against their CERCLA liability by using common law contract tools, including indemnification and hold harmless agreements. But what role did Congress intend such private party agreements to play in allocating CERCLA liability? The plainly contradictory language of CERCLA § 107(e) does not give a final answer to this question, because the first sentence of CERCLA § 107(e) appears to invalidate indemnities and the like, and the second sentence appears to save them.

Editors' Summary: The Atomic Energy Act does not regulate a variety of substances that occur routinely in nature or that may become radioactively enhanced through human activity. These substances, known as naturally occurring radioactive material or NORM, may exist in waste produced by key industrial activities involving petroleum, natural gas, geothermal energy, water treatment, and mining. The NRC, EPA, and some states are now attempting to regulate some of the hazards that they perceive are caused by NORM.

For trial lawyers and judges, the U.S. Supreme Court's "Daubert Four"—four unanimous decisions since 1993, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.,¹ General Electric Co. v. Joiner,² Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael,³ and Weisgram v.

In recent years, lawmakers of all sorts have become interested in scientific peer review, and have the hope that scrutiny by independent experts can improve the quality of their own decisionmaking. As the phrase implies, peer review refers to the process of having work scrutinized by fellow experts, and it has long served as a quality control mechanism for the scientific community.

If a value system is simply presupposed and obeyed as the given structure of the world that all are made to accept and serve, it can become systematically destructive without our knowing there is a moral choice involved.¹

An important battle is currently taking place over the future direction of environmental enforcement in the United States. The conflict is in part between businesses and government; more fundamentally, however, it is between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the states. EPA's vision of effective enforcement is one grounded in deterrence, the theory that generally underlies societal efforts to control unlawful behavior. Many states, by contrast, have been shifting to a more conciliatory, cooperation-oriented approach.

Shades of the 1950s! People are worried about "urban sprawl."¹ Shades of the 1970s! People are worried about energy prices.² And they are even beginning to realize once again that there is a connection.³ Will we be any more successful in resolving these issues now than we were a generation or two ago? Do advances in technology give us reason for optimism?

Introduction

Sometimes new notions capture our fancy, resonate to some element of our experience, and color the way we see the world. The concept of a post-industrial society is just such a notion. It gives voice to our experience of big changes, shapes our perceptions of their tone and texture, and organizes our understanding of their direction. But the notion obscures the precise location of those changes and their meanings.¹

Environmental laws seem to face, in the Rehnquist Court, a situation like that old silent movie serial "The Perils of Pauline." Environmental laws hardly ever seem to have even a single U.S.