In a recent article reviewing the U.S. Supreme Court's environmental decisions over the last 30 years (1969-1999), Professor Richard Lazarus argues that "the Justices have never fully appreciated environmental law as a distinct area of law."¹

A recent headline on the front page of the Wall Street Journal hailed the opening of the nation's first "butterfly bank." The "deposits" in this unusual bank are conservation credits earned by preserving an important area of habitat for the Quino checkerspot butterfly, an endangered species restricted to California. The bank's intended customers are other landowners who hope to develop other sites where the butterfly occurs. In order to do so, they can buy credits from the private entrepreneur who established the butterfly bank.

Editors' Summary: In recent years, vindication of private-property rights has been the rallying cry of various citizen groups and politicians who believe that certain regulatory restrictions—especially environmental protection measures—have "gone too far" and that the Fifth Amendment is an insufficient safeguard of private-property rights.

On June 29, 2001, the last day of the October 2000 term, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to consider "whether the [Ninth Circuit] Court of Appeals properly determined that a temporary moratorium on land development does not constitute a taking of property requiring compensation under the Takings Clause of the [U.S.] Constitution?" The case, Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, provides the Court with an opportunity to clarify its opinions in First English Evangelical Lutheran Church of Glendale v.

While the Republican's Contract With America has disappeared from the political landscape, many of its ideas continue to percolate in the 105th Congress. Development interests continue to promote federal legislation to expand opportunities for "takings" claims against the government. Through such takings claims developers or private landowners seek to be compensated for not polluting or not building on protected land.

Conventional wisdom says that the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) is an impediment to the reuse of brownfields. Examination of a decade of experience, however, reveals that properties "captured by the net" of RCRA jurisdiction have gone on to new, productive, and economically viable reuse. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is also a great potential for many more RCRA properties to do so.

The focus of much dialogue and debate in the public eye over climate change and greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) tends to focus on industrial emissions of pollution for manufacturing or the production of electricity. Emissions from transportation sources (like trains, planes, and automobiles) and from the heating, cooling, and lighting of buildings themselves are less readily visible, yet each constitutes roughly a third of America's total greenhouse gas emissions.