Editors' Summary: Since late 1992, two congressional committees and an academic group working for a member of a third committee have issued reports severely criticizing the Environmental Crimes Section (ECS) of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The reports focus on alleged deep divisions among the three units of the federal government responsible for the prosecution of environmental crimes: the ECS, local U.S. Attorneys' Offices, and EPA's Office of Criminal Enforcement.

Editors' Summary: In their attempts to promote environmental protection domestically, countries are adopting measures that have impacts beyond their borders -- primarily on international trade. The interrelationship of environmental protection and free trade is especially evident from the recent negotiations involving NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of GATT. Harmonizing conflicts between environmentalists and free trade advocates has emerged as a major challenge to governments and other international players.

Years ago, environmental law was considered a specialized branch of administrative law. Environmental law-suits generally involved either enforcement (government regulators or environmentalists suing businesses) or regulatory appeals (businesses or environmentalists suing the government).

Market-based approaches to protecting the environment based on buying and selling "pollution rights" have long been special favorites of the academic community. According to a growing body of literature, a much wider use of this approach could solve the problems of ineffectiveness, inefficiency, and rigidity that characterize our current system of environmental protection.¹

On May 18, 1993, Carol M. Browner, Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced a new federal hazardous waste policy.¹ Noting that incinerators and industrial furnaces, i.e., cement kilns, annually burn almost five million tons of hazardous waste, Ms. Browner let it be known that EPA would soon change how things stood. In her announcement, she outlined a new strategy, based on increasing the incentives for waste reduction and slowing growth in the number of combustion units. EPA would encourage waste reduction, Ms.

Editors' Summary: Nongovernmental organizations and other critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have raised serious environmental concerns about Mexico's participation in NAFTA. The U.S. EPA has attempted to address these concerns by evaluating Mexican environmental laws, regulations, and standards. This Article is based on EPA's evaluation and provides a general overview of Mexico's environmental legal system, although its does not review Mexico's state and local environmental laws or its federal mechanisms for environmental law enforcement.

For over a decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) "mixture rule" clarified the status under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act¹ (RCRA) of mixtures containing listed hazardous waste and nonhazardous solid waste.² But the rule's recent vacatur and repromulgation have created a significant gap in the rule's coverage. Because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated it ab initio, the rule does not cover conduct that occurred before EPA's 1992 repromulgation.

On May 2, 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court joined -- but certainly did not end -- a debate about the disposal of ash produced from burning municipal solid waste in waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerators. In City of Chicago v.

Editors' Summary: On May 20, 1994, a three-member dispute panel of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) held that the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), which provides authority for the United States to embargo tuna from other countries, violates GATT.

Editors' Summary: In 1980, Congress adopted the Bevill Amendment, which amends RCRA to exempt temporarily from Subtitle C regulation solid waste from ore and mineral extraction, beneficiation, and processing. The Amendment directed EPA either to promulgate Subtitle C regulations for the waste or determine that the exemption should continue. This Article examines EPA's regulatory response to this directive and the major court cases that have addressed that response.