With a contentious presidential election looming amidst a pandemic, economic worries, and historic protests against systemic racism, climate action may seem less pressing than other challenges. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund, the U.S. Supreme Court held, 6-3, that the Clean Water Act requires a national pollutant discharge elimination system permit “when there is the functional equivalent of a direct discharge.” The Court also decided Atlantic Richfield Co. v. Christian, holding, 7-2, that landowners adjacent to a Superfund site were potentially responsible parties under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act.

An increasingly sophisticated public, rapid changes in monitoring technology, the ability to process large volumes of data, and social media are increasing the capacity for members of the public and advocacy groups to gather, interpret, and exchange environmental data. This development has the potential to alter the government-centric approach to environmental governance; however, citizen science has had a mixed record in influencing government decisions and actions.

This Article tackles a question that has vexed the administrative state for the last half-century: how to seriously take account of the distributional consequences of regulation. The academic literature has largely accepted the view that distributional concerns should be moved out of the regulatory domain and into Congress’ tax policy portfolio. In doing so, it has overlooked the fact that tax policy is ill-suited to provide compensation for significant environmental, health, and safety harms.

In this Article, the authors explore the “stealth” use of science by the Executive Branch to advance deregulation and highlight the limited, existing legal and institutional constraints in place to discipline and discourage these practices. Political appointees have employed dozens of strategies over the years, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, to manipulate science in ends-oriented ways that advance the goal of deregulation.

Prof. Jill E. Fisch has authored an excellent piece about sustainability disclosure. Her proposal to mandate a new Sustainability Disclosure and Analysis section of SEC filings is an interesting idea for improving the disclosures that investors currently receive regarding such important matters as climate change, human capital, and a range of other issues. She also proposes that company management certify as to the accuracy of these disclosures, another step toward improved disclosure.

Sustainability disclosure is at an impasse. Today’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure is not delivering the decision-useful information financial markets need, yet the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) so far has not taken steps to formalize sustainability disclosure. Prof. Jill E.

As we have come to expect from Prof. Jill Fisch, her recent article entitled Making Sustainability Disclosure Sustainable introduces a novel and thoughtful policy proposal on a matter of critical importance to investors. In short, she suggests a new sustainability discussion and analysis (SD&A) section within the corporate annual report. In their SD&A, companies would be required to identify and explain the three sustainability issues most significant to their operations.

In her Making Sustainability Disclosures Sustainable article, Prof. Jill E. Fisch proposes creating a Sustainability Discussion and Analysis (SD&A) section to expressly obligate reporting companies to disclose their three most significant sustainability issues in annual reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Professor Fisch posits that the proposed SD&A, as a workable first step in mandating sustainability disclosures, would provide comparability and reliability to reports that are currently difficult to compare and which may vary in reliability.

The extent to which corporations should incorporate sustainability objectives into their operational decisionmaking is highly contested, as is the relationship between societal impact and economic value. At the same time, issuers are incorporating sustainability considerations into their business operations in response both to investor demands and to the claim that sustainable business practices lead to improved economic performance.