Editors' Summary: Institutional controls are a mechanism for providing a certain degree of safety in the absence of technology that could clean contaminated sites thoroughly. Institutional controls come in a variety of forms, each of which can be designed to meet specific site needs. Flexible but long-lasting mechanisms such as institutional controls can be used to ensure that land uses continue to be compatible with the level of cleanup at a site.

Congress enacted the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) in 1976, to regulate management of solid and hazardous waste. RCRA Subtitle C regulates hazardous waste management and Subtitle D governs nonhazardous, solid waste. In 1984, Congress passed the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments (HSWA), significantly amending and expanding RCRA Subtitle C. HSWA added to RCRA the Land Disposal Restriction (LDR) Program, or land ban, which bars land disposal of hazardous wastes that fail to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA or the Agency)-promulgated treatment standards.

Editors' Summary: Congress first addressed the problem of leaking underground storage tanks (USTs) in 1984, by enacting Subtitle I of RCRA. The UST regulatory program addresses, inter alia, corrosion protection, reporting, corrective action, and financial responsibility. In this Article, the author provides an overview of the federal UST program. The author outlines the program's significant elements and explores specific regulations in the context of the technical problems they are intended to address, giving particular attention to how, to what, and to whom the regulations apply.

The government use of compulsory purchase and land use control powers appears to be increasing worldwide as competition for useable and livable space increases. The need for large and relatively undeveloped space for agriculture and conservation purposes often competes with the need for shelter and the commercial and industrial development accompanying such development for employment, product production and distribution, and other largely urban uses.

Editors' Summary: Property rights advocates implicitly complained in Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon that a Fish and Wildlife Service regulation that aimed to protect endangered and threatened species by defining "harm" to include habitat modification impinged on their rights as private landowners by asking them to share with the government responsibility for protecting such species. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the regulation as reasonable given the relevant language of the Endangered Species Act.

The bedrock notion that courts should, in the overwhelming majority of cases, defer to lawmakers is currently under attack in the nation's courts, commentary, and classrooms. Leading the way are several U.S. Supreme Court Justices who, in cases involving the U.S. Commerce Clause, Takings Clause, and §5 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, are much more willing than their immediate predecessors to second-guess the motives and tactics of elected and appointed officials at all levels of government.

Editors' Summary: Although most talk in terms of wildlife protection seems to focus on the operation of the ESA, there are a host of other federal and state laws designed to protect wildlife from the impacts of resource-development projects—before the species become threatened or endangered.

Water policy in the United States has been significantly influenced in recent years by a number of high-profile environmental and water use conflicts, including disputes relating to California's Bay Delta, Florida's Everglades, the management of the Colorado River system, the Columbia/Snake system, and the Klamath and Trinity River Basins. For a variety of legal, institutional, and financial reasons, the federal government has played a major role in all of these matters, typically in partnership with state and local stakeholders.

One of the most fundamental tenets of toxicology is that "the dose determines the poison." This simple phrase provides the basis for the belief that all agents—chemicals and physical phenomena that are capable of producing some effect—have the potential to cause toxicity. Whether toxicity actually occurs is principally a matter of dose: the greater the exposure to a given agent, the more pronounced or severe the response of a cell or organism.

[Editors' Summary: This Article is adapted from The Law of Green Buildings: Regulatory and Legal Issues in Design, Construction, Operations, and Financing ch. 2 (J. Cullen Howe & Michael B. Gerrard eds., 2010). Copyright © 2010 by the American Bar Association and co-published with ELI Press. Reprinted by permission. This book provides an overview of green building law from a variety of well-known attorneys and other professionals in the green building field. These legal issues are likely to evolve quickly—and perhaps radically—in the coming years.