Prof. Cary Coglianese’s article—A Truly “Top Task”: Rulemaking and Its Accessibility on Agency Websites—explains the importance of the agency rulemaking
process and describes obstacles encountered by members of the public who wish to participate in that process. During the almost 40 years I have been practicing administrative law, I have participated in hundreds of agency proceedings. Over the years, agencies have improved the procedures for obtaining such information, but there is still room for improvement.

Government websites provide an important location for public access and participation in the governmental process. However, despite a growing body of research on agency websites, researchers have so far ignored agency websites as a method of public contact over rulemaking. In this article, I report results from two systematic surveys conducted on regulatory agencies’ websites which reveal how much more agencies could do to improve public access to rulemaking.

In this Article, we draw on the results of the ELPAR article selection process to report on trends in environmental legal scholarship for academic years 2008-2013. Specifically, this Article reports on the number of environmental law articles published in general law reviews and environmental law journals. We find that although the total varied somewhat from year to year, more than 400 environmental law articles were published each year during the 2008-2013 period.

Low-level toxic tort claims are challenging traditional tort notions of injury and causation. Low-level exposures form the basis of claims in both environmental contamination cases and toxic product liability actions and may involve exposures below thresholds set in government health and safety standards. Establishing injury-in-fact and causation is especially problematic in low-level toxic tort claims due to latent harms, multiple defendants, and scientific uncertainty.

In order for biofuels to count as renewable energy for transport under the European Union Renewable Energy Directive, most applicants have relied on certification by the European Commission. But bilateral agreements can also be used to meet the sustainability criteria. This Article examines the bilateral agreement option, particularly whether such agreements might provide more flexibility in developing countries that export to the EU, while also addressing more general land use policies and cross-sector linkages in natural resource management.

China is establishing a carbon emissions trading scheme and has initiated a number of pilot projects with robust measurement, reporting, and verification systems and rigorous sanctions for noncompliance. Although the project designs vary, they share a number of features, including favoring self-monitoring, self-reporting, and third-party verification. Policymakers are also considering a program of emissions permits and monitoring, and there are indications that the program will include the authority to impose major financial penalties for noncompliance.

There is now a 40-year history of declaratory outcomes from international environmental conferences that offers insight into the progression of sustainable development. This Article uses those outcomes to track the relative roles of the environmental, social, and economic pillars of sustainable development. As these roles have changed, the theory of sustainability and the impetus to realize it in practice have changed as well. The Article questions the meaning of these changes and asks whether the end result is what was intended at the beginning.

The ongoing rancor in Congress over climate change makes it unlikely that the United States will ratify a treaty as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Executive agreements are often seen as interchangeable with Article II treaties, and §115 of the Clean Air Act may provide a needed statutory hook for President Barack Obama to conclude executive agreements on climate change. This Article finds that President Obama likely has authority to bind the United States to greenhouse gas emission targets under this legislative provision and that his actions are likely not judicially reviewable.

On March 25, 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to revise their rules defining which water bodies are protected by the Clean Water Act. As with so much of our public discourse, the reactions from across the political spectrum have included a lot of overheated rhetoric with little regard for the changes that the proposal would actually make.

Concerned about groundwater contamination and the potential health effects of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), a gasoline additive used to curtail air pollution, several states have banned its use. Similarly, MTBE has been the subject of a great deal of litigation. And while the Energy Policy Act of 2005 did not ban MTBE outright, it eliminated the federal oxygenate requirement for gasoline, thereby making the additive unnecessary. But according to Richard Faulk and John Gray, the controversy surrounding MTBE is greatly exaggerated.