While the environmental justice movement has gained traction in the United States, the relationship between agri-food systems and environmental injustices in rural areas has yet to come into focus. This Article explores the relationship between U.S. agricultural exceptionalism and rural environmental justice through examining right-to-farm laws.

Climate impacts in the United States disproportionately fall on low-income communities and communities of color. As the costs of climate adaptation mount, municipalities and states have brought litigation against fossil fuel companies to recover for extensive damage caused by climate change. Drawing on lessons from previous tobacco and asbestos suits, this Article argues that damages litigation—while properly heard in state courts—has significant shortcomings as an equitable climate change adaptation strategy.

This abstract is adapted from Monte Mills & Martin Nie, Bridges to a New Era: A Report on the Past, Present, and Potential Future of Tribal Co-Management on Federal Public Lands, 44 Pub. Land & Resources L. Rev. 49 (2021), and used with permission.

On February 28, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the landmark West Virginia v. EPA case, involving the scope of powers delegated to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through the Clean Air Act. The Court’s decision will affect administrative law, and could have major consequences for environmental law, particularly the Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and take action on climate change.

At this point in time, climate change pervades every aspect of contemporary life. It is a persistent current through our lives and, increasingly, throughout the law. One would be hard-pressed to find any area of law that has not or will not soon be touched by climate change. The onset of climate change has prompted decades worth of deep and wide efforts to reshape law and policy. Yet, alongside this development, there is also erosion.

President Joe Biden’s Executive Order No. 14008 of January 2021 called for the Administration to conserve at least 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030. To accomplish this ambitious “30 by 30” effort, the Order directed federal agencies to work with tribal governments, among others, to propose lands and waters as qualifying for conservation. This Comment examines "areas of critical environmental concern" and their potential role in the 30 by 30 program, particularly their potential to enlist tribal governments in helping to manage lands of tribal cultural significance. 

The European Union, China, California, and a number of U.S. states in the Northeast are currently using emissions trading as part of their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, the popularity of emissions trading as a policy tool co-exists with a well-established, and increasingly politically powerful, set of critiques of it in the United States. These critiques come from environmental justice advocates as well as some academics and other observers.

Efforts to hold major greenhouse gas emitters accountable for the harms caused by global climate change have been consistently frustrated at the procedural stages of litigation in U.S. federal courts. This Article explores using a combination of class action mechanisms to engage with these threshold barriers and hold carbon-major corporations responsible for climate impacts.

On January 28, 2021, President Joseph Biden issued Executive Order No. 14008 initiating the “30 by 30” program to “conserve” 30% of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030, but to date, the Administration has yet to clarify the standards defining "conservation" lands. In September 2021, Nada Culver, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and Chris French, the deputy chief of the Forest Service’s National Forest System (NFS) confirmed at an annual Public Lands Council meeting that they believe the nation’s grazing lands “should [be] include[d]” in the 30 by 30 count.

The Paris Agreement’s goal to hold warming to 1.5°-2°C above pre-industrial levels now appears unrealistic. Profs. Robin Kundis Craig and J.B. Ruhl have recently argued that because a 4°C world may be likely, we must recognize the disruptive consequences of such a world and respond by reimagining governance structures to meet the challenges of adapting to it.