In Environmental Citizen Suits and the Inequities of Races to the Top, David E. Adelman and Jori Reilly-Diakun provide a cogent empirical analysis of citizen suits aimed at assessing whether these statutory causes of action are meeting the intent of the U.S. Congress to serve as a layer of protection against lax federal or state enforcement of environmental laws.

This Comment is based on an edited transcription of Howard Learner's remarks at the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review conference. See 2021-2022 Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review Conference, available at https://www.eli.org/ environmental-law-policy-annual-review/2021-2022-ELPAR-conference.

Citizen suits are filed disproportionately in a small number of states with robust environmental programs. This bias magnifies disparities across states both directly, by ensuring that standards and procedures are followed in favored states, and indirectly, by driving development with significant environmental impacts towards states in which citizen suits are rare and enforcement is less rigorous.

This Comment provides an empirical snapshot of the environmental legal literature for the 2020-2021 academic year, as well as  information on the top articles chosen for re-publication by the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR), which is published by the Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School.

Proposed oil and gas pipelines have faced a myriad of legal challenges in the past several years. Even where pipeline proponents have prevailed, the cost and delay of protracted litigation has often caused cancellation of pipeline projects. In addition, presidential transitions have led to abrupt reversals of pipeline policies, which courts have often reviewed skeptically.

The United States currently does not have capacity to recycle its waste domestically, nor can it export the amount of waste it once did. Many states are trying to solve this crisis through novel legislation, but states cannot solve this crisis on their own. This Article argues that the federal government should take the lead in developing new law and policy designed to increase national recycling rates.

This Comment is adapted from Chapter 7 in Joshua Ozymy & Melissa Jarrell Ozymy, Toxic Intent: Environmental Harm, Corporate Crime, and the Criminal Enforcement of Federal Environmental Laws in the United States (ELI Press forthcoming 2022).

The Joe Biden Administration has proposed reversing a number of the Donald Trump Administration’s changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations by again requiring federal agencies to evaluate the direct, indirect, and cumulative environmental impacts of projects under environmental review. On April 20, 2022, the first phase of those amendments was finalized, and on April 21, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a panel of experts to explore the changes to NEPA implementation, and how they might impact climate change policy and environmental justice.