Editors' Summary: In Harmon Industries, Inc. v. Browner, the Eighth Circuit held that once a state with an authorized RCRA program has taken an enforcement action against a defendant, EPA may not maintain a separate enforcement action based on the same set of facts, a practice commonly referred to as "overfiling." The Eighth Circuit held that the Agency's practice of overfiling violated both the language of RCRA and the doctrine of res judicata.
Editors' Summary: In Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, the U.S. Supreme Court held that regulations that deprive a landowner of economically beneficial use of land are compensable under the Fifth Amendment unless the regulation in question either prevents a nuisance or is part of a state's "back-ground principles" of property law. While nuisance law is fairly well understood, the second exception to the rule of compensation is not.
Editors' Summary: The law surrounding medical monitoring claims is relatively new and unsettled, but the uncertainty of the law has not stopped tort litigants from increasingly asserting such claims when seeking recovery for toxic exposure. This Article analyzes medical monitoring claims and details the difficult issues that courts are struggling with as they determine the viability of such claims. The Article first distinguishes a claim for medical monitoring from similar claims for enhanced risk of harm or fear of developing an injury or disease.
Editors' Summary: In the second of two Articles, Professor Craig. N. Oren examines the controversial recent opinion, and subsequent denial of rehearing en banc, in American Trucking Ass'n v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in which a panel ofthe D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals remanded EPA's air quality standards for ozone and particulate matter. In his first Article, Professor Oren analyzed the reasons, logic, alternatives to, and likely consequences of the court's remand of the air quality standards based on the delegation doctrine.
In December 1935, in a hotel room in Nazi-governed Berlin, Aldo Leopold sat down to a desk and pulled out a sheet of hotel stationery. Turning the paper over, he scratched the word "Wilderness" across the top, and then proceeded to write 10 sentences in his tight cursive hand. Thoughts had come to him that day, and he wanted to get them on paper. The ideas were not new ones, at least not for him, but the phrasings that evening seemed clearer, more exact, and worth keeping.
Editors' Summary: Since the Vietnam War, multilateral treaties and international organizations have attempted to create and implement legal provisions that would deter and redress the environmental damages of war. Unfortunately, international acceptance and enforcement of such provisions has arrived only in incremental responses to the horrors of previous wars. This Dialogue examines how the 1999 conflict in Kosovo exposed many of the current deficiencies of the legal framework addressing the environmental consequences of war.
The U.S. Supreme Court's property rights jurisprudence always has had a Delphic quality. During this century, its seminal expressions have been Justice Holmes' enigmatic "too far" language in Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon1 and Justice Brennan's reliance on the amorphous conception of "investment-backed expectations" in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York.2 The Court's 1999 decision in City of Monterey v. Del Monte Dunes at Monterey, Ltd.3 does not depart from this pattern.
During its first 15 years of existence, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sought to improve environmental quality through conventional "end-of-pipe" command and control regulation. In the late 1980s, EPA shifted to a new paradigm in environmental protection: to enhance environmental protection by encouraging "voluntary" pollution prevention. EPA believes that if companies are given the appropriate incentive they will identify the best control for the least cost.
In March of 1995, President Clinton and Vice President Gore announced 25 actions that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would take to reinvent environmental regulation.1 These actions recognized 25 years of success achieved by our current system of environmental protection, yet acknowledged that EPA needed to better align that system with the changing world we regulate. Reinvention serves four timely and important purposes at EPA:
The court holds that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to consider adequately the environmental impact of a petroleum pipeline that crosses under a proposed reservoir before issuing a Federal Water Pollution Control Act §404 permit. In issuin...