In the fall of 1993, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in its opinion in In re Bell Petroleum Services, Inc., articulated its standard for determining joint and several liability under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA). In so doing, it joined the ranks of four other circuit courts that have spoken on this issue.

One of the most prominent issues in the Congressional debate over reauthorization of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund) has been how to reduce "transaction costs" while at the same time fairly and expeditiously resolving liability disputes. This Dialogue asks: Would the allocation procedures proposed in last year's Superfund reauthorization bills meet those sometimes conflicting goals?

On February 4, 1994, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) April 1992 lender liability rule, which delineated the scope of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act's (CERCLA's) secured creditor exemption. The court held in Kelley v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that the regulation could not stand as a substantive or legislative rule because Congress, through CERCLA, gave courts and not EPA the authority to interpret questions of liability.

Earlier this year in KFC Western, Inc. v. Meghrig, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that private parties may obtain restitution of the costs of cleaning up contaminated property under §7002(a)(1)(B) of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The Ninth Circuit's ruling in KFC Western opened the way for private parties to use the RCRA citizen suit provision to recover their costs of investigating, studying, and cleaning up contaminated property from responsible parties.

Although the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been widely acclaimed as an instrument of decisionmaking reform, doubts have periodically been expressed regarding its effectiveness.¹ No legislation, however well intentioned or successful, should be exempt from periodic reexamination. Some criticisms of NEPA have been well-founded—prompting improvements in its implementation—but other criticisms have faulted the Act itself, claiming it to be counter-productive in relation to the purposes for which it was enacted.

An easement is a limited right, granted by the owner of real property, to use all or part of his property for specific purposes. A traditional legal use of an easement, for example, has been for owner A, on whose property a stream flows, to allow neighbor B to cross A's property in order to take water from A's stream.

From an environmental perspective, the midterm record of the 96th Congress was notable less for its achievements than as convincing evidence that the climate of concern and commitment to protection that led to a surge in environmental legislation in the early part of the 1970s has drastically changed. There is a certain irony in this shift because it comes at a time when continuing and newly recognized threats to environmental integrity beset the country as never before.

After more than a decade of litigation-intensive environmental controversies, environmental groups and their opponents have begun to look for alternative means of settling disputes. Formal litigation can be so burdensome and take so long to resolve that it may present one of the least efficient and least effective means of obtaining relief. Mediation, a technique that is in a relatively early stage of development in environmental disputes, is emerging as one promising method of conflict resolution.

Over the last several years, public attention has focused increasingly on the risks associated with hazardous wastes and other toxic substances. Incidents of environmental contamination at locales such as Love Canal, New York, Toone, Tennessee, and Gray, Maine, have fueled the controversy and have led to claims that releases of toxic substances and hazardous wastes constitute a serious threat to public health and the environment. Indeed, as reports of such incidents have mounted,¹ so have the estimated costs of addressing the problem.

The National Environmental Policy Act's (NEPA's) requirement that environmental impact statements (EISs) be prepared for "major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment"¹ has been well defined by the courts and is now a fact of life with which federal agencies routinely contend. Less well defined or accepted, however, is the requirement that impact statements be supplemented when important new information comes to light or when a project has been modified such that the original EIS is rendered inadequate.