In the first decades of the 21st century, those working to assure that earth continues to be a viable home for humanity as well as for all other life have been in a crisis regarding their purpose and direction. This is a departure from the past century and a half, when the giants of conservation and environmental protection—personalities such as John Muir, Rachel Carson, and David Brower— were certain of their cause and the actions needed to sustain it.

This Article analyzes the recent proliferation of “tag-gag” laws aimed at undermining the emerging plantbased and cell-based food industries. It examines potential constitutional challenges to these laws, including those based on the First Amendment, the dormant Commerce Clause, Supremacy Clause, and Due Process Clause, as well as the likely arguments that states will proffer in their defense. It concludes with a discussion of the consequences and implications of various outcomes of these cases, and how animal advocates can responsibly bring these types of constitutional challenges.

We are practitioners for the City of Philadelphia with extensive experience in cases and analysis regarding the extent to which the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has, or has not, preempted local regulation in various subjects of concern to the City. As City attorneys, our perspective is based in our role as advocates for the preservation and defense of the City’s exercise of its home rule powers. In considering the city-state relationship, many of the practical, political and cultural issues addressed in Prof. Richard C.

On March 11, 2019, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking to amend regulations that implement the Coastal Zone Management Act’s (CZMA’s) consistency requirement. This Article places the notice in context, focusing on the CZMA’s role in state review of offshore oil and gas development and its evolution to provide a predictable framework that balances coastal state interests with the nation’s energy needs.

Marine litter is human-created waste that has been discharged into the marine environment, including glass, metal, plastics, and other debris. According to data compiled by the United Nations, the equivalent of a garbage truck filled with plastic is dumped into the ocean every minute—more than 8 million metric tons per year. On November 11, 2019, the Environmental Law Institute hosted an expert panel that explored recent U.S.

The plastic packaging industry faces mounting shareholder and public pressure to reduce the environmental impact of post-consumer plastic packaging. The recycled plastics market in the United States is positioned for growth; however, developing a reliable supply of post-consumer plastics will be expensive because of problems in the recycling market. Reliance on export markets has limited investment in domestic recycling capacity, local collection programs vary considerably, and many consumers are ignorant about what can be recycled.

Millions of tons of plastic enter the environment every year, killing wildlife, releasing toxins, clogging drains, and marring landscapes. Bans or restrictions on single-use plastics have exploded in popularity in recent years as a means of addressing these problems. Yet these bans remain controversial, with some businesses pushing back against what they consider excessive regulation and others maintaining that banning single-use plastics uses political capital that could be spent advancing more urgent and systemic agendas.

Do-It-Yourself biology, 3D printing, and the sharing economy are equipping ordinary people with new powers to shape their biological, physical, and social environments. This phenomenon of distributed innovation is yielding new goods and services, greater economic productivity, and new opportunities for fulfillment. Distributed innovation also brings new environmental, health, and security risks that demand oversight, yet conventional government regulation may be poorly suited to address these risks.

Cities often test the existing limits of their regulatory authority in areas like environmental protection, labor and employment, and immigration. The last few years witnessed an explosion of preemptive state legislation attacking, challenging, and overriding municipal ordinances across a wide range of policy areas. But this hostility to city government is not new. In 1915, one professor observed that “the relations of states to metropolitan cities in this country is ‘a history of repeated injuries’ .  .  .

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of some of the most creative and feasible environmental law and policy proposals from the legal academic literature each year. The pool of articles that are considered includes all environmental law articles published during the previous academic year.