Cities often test the existing limits of their regulatory authority in areas like environmental protection, labor and employment, and immigration. The last few years witnessed an explosion of preemptive state legislation attacking, challenging, and overriding municipal ordinances across a wide range of policy areas. But this hostility to city government is not new. In 1915, one professor observed that “the relations of states to metropolitan cities in this country is ‘a history of repeated injuries’ .  .  .

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of some of the most creative and feasible environmental law and policy proposals from the legal academic literature each year. The pool of articles that are considered includes all environmental law articles published during the previous academic year.

Does the duty of environmental protection belong in the ethical rules for our profession? A number of scholars have explored whether lawyers should bear such duties. But little attention has focused on the possibility that “green ethics” would also be appropriate for judges. Rules of judicial ethics frame the manner in which judges take account of environmental concerns. At present, these rules provide very little guidance that is relevant to environmental matters.

Cities have become a critical source of innovation across a wide array of policy areas that advance inclusion, equitable opportunity, and social justice. In the absence of state and federal action, cities and other local governments have taken the lead in enacting minimum wage and paid sick leave policies, expanding the boundaries of civil rights, tackling public health challenges, responding to emerging environmental threats, and advancing new technologies.

Our planet is hurtling toward dramatic and devastating impacts from climate change caused in large part by our reliance on fossil fuels. Meanwhile, liberalized trading rules have promoted a global economy heavily reliant on trade, which itself increases greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Prof. Timothy Meyer has written a thought-provoking article about how governments selectively enforce trade laws in ways that undermine environmental interests. He argues trade enforcement against products with social benefits (i.e., renewable energy and farmed fish) slows their development and results in an implicit subsidy for products with social costs (i.e., fossil fuels and wild-caught fish)—at the expense of products with social benefits.

The notion of “fair” trade implies that trade agreements should protect values other than pure trade liberalization. But which values must be protected in order for trade to be “fair”? This Article makes two novel contributions. First, focusing on the environmental context, it demonstrates that selective enforcement in trade law today is pervasive. Notably, instead of selectively enforcing environmental laws to gain a trade advantage—the traditional concern of critics—governments selectively enforce trade laws in ways that hurt environmental interests.

In Federal Lands and Fossil Fuels: Maximizing Social Welfare in Federal Energy Leasing, Prof. Jayni Foley Hein assesses inefficiencies in the federal fossil fuel leasing program that lead to the over-extraction of fossil fuels at great societal cost. In recognition of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI's) role in stewarding federal lands for the long-term benefit of the American people, Hein proposes that DOI should adopt a policy of seeking to maximize social welfare or “net public benefits” in its leasing decisions.

The externality costs of fossil fuel production—including pollution costs—are not accounted for under the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (Interior) coal, oil, and natural gas leasing programs. This results in fossil fuel production on public lands imposing significant social costs. Interior’s leasing programs have never been tailored to meet any past or present climate change goals, despite their significant contribution to domestic greenhouse gas emissions.