Despite existing laws, communities across the United States are exposed to dangerous environmental conditions that can have devastating effects on public health. One emerging mechanism to address these issues are “green amendments,” self-executing provisions added to a state constitution that recognize and protect the rights of all people, including future generations, to pure water, clean air, and a stable climate.
When the Internal Revenue Service began disallowing gifts of perpetual conservation easements for claimed failures of perpetuity requirements, it tumbled land trusts, landowners, and the U.S. Tax Court down the rabbit hole to a baffling land below. The Service’s drop into matters beyond valuation and into elements intended and necessary for easement durability and flexibility has caused a confusing array of Tax Court decisions.
Faced with interconnected crises—affordable housing, and environmental and climate injustice—in low-income, disadvantaged, and Black and Brown communities, this Comment asserts that President Joseph Biden should adopt the same or similar approach of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and challenge Congress to enact sweeping environmental and climate justice legislation in the first 100 days.
The coronavirus pandemic, the push for racial justice, and continued efforts to mitigate climate change have emerged as key challenges for corporations. At the center of this trifecta of change are supply chains; onequarter of the global supply chain, approximately $4.5 trillion, could shift by 2025. Leading companies are rebuilding supply chains more resilient to the disruptions caused by climate change and more cognizant of environmental, social, and governance expectations, while prioritizing suppliers that promote racial justice and companies owned by people of color.
President Donald Trump’s environmental policies appear detrimental to the environmental justice (EJ) movement, but little work has been done to test their true impact on EJ. This Article offers a method for evaluating progress (or lack thereof) across the last three presidential administrations, proposing three metrics for progress: access to legal recourse, consideration of climate change as an EJ issue, and signaling actions.
The appropriate use of science in policymaking depends upon integrity in scientific research and in the ways in which that research is communicated and applied throughout the policymaking process. On May 22, 2019, the University of California, Irvine School of Law’s Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources (CLEANR) and the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) convened a roundtable that brought together leading scientists, scholars, advocates, and policymakers to explore potential safeguards to protect scientific research and its use in feder
This Article focuses on an area of rapidly evolving jurisprudence—climate liability litigation. It examines in depth the state attorney general’s complaint filed in Rhode Island v. Chevron Corp. in 2018, alleging various state-law tort claims. It explores the intensely sustained legal battles taking place between states and fossil fuel companies over whether federal courts or state courts should have jurisdiction, which in many respects is the “ballgame issue” for both plaintiffs and defendants.