This Article discusses the Trump Administration’s main actions to undermine the role of science in public policy and the consequences for cost-benefit analysis involving climate change policies. It analyzes the specific attacks on science and their impact on relevant policies, namely, the rollbacks of the Clean Water Rule, the pesticides ban, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Power Plan, as well as modification of the National Environmental Policy Act and regulations promoting fuel efficiency, and the flexibilization of environmental enforcement during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As in prior years, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 contains a variety of provisions setting U.S. Department of Defense priorities for energy, environmental, and natural resource issues. These include measures that represent some degree of consensus on these often-politicized topics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and complex machine learning algorithms have come to play a profound role in many of our day-to-day activities.

The COVID-19 pandemic will have far-reaching and even transformative implications for environmental law.

As companies increase their environmental, social, governance (ESG) reporting and statements in response to market and shareholder demands, plaintiffs have pursued with growing success legal challenges to company claims and disclosures related to ESG performance. Similarly, inventive theories are being put forward to directly attack companies for alleged ESG-related performance and operational deficiencies. In both arenas, there has been a recent growth in efforts to hold companies accountable for supplier misconduct.

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.

This article highlights the results of the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) article selection process and reports on the environmental legal scholarship for the 2018-2019 academic year, including the number of environmental law articles published in general law reviews versus environmental law journals, and the topics covered in the articles.

The livestock sector is one of the planet’s primary causes of resource consumption and environmental degradation. Approximately 99% of meat and other animal products in the United States are from factory farms, and the number of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) continues to grow. This Article, adapted from Chapter 8 of What Can Animal Law Learn From Environmental Law?, 2d Edition (ELI Press, forthcoming 2020), examines animal agriculture in the U.S and the associated problems.

The role that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) plays in regulatory decisionmaking is at a crossroads, as is the role played by the agency that oversees its implementation, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The Trump Administration has largely demonstrated agnosticism toward CBA; this has left many to question whether OIRA can still play the role of ensuring quality analysis while serving as the eyes and ears of the president in overseeing regulation.