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.

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).

This Article explores the relationship between state environmental citizen suit provisions and judicial standing requirements, and analyzes whether the introduction of citizen suits into state statutory law inspired increasingly strict state standing requirements, as occurred at the federal level. Specifically, it identifies how state judiciaries have interpreted standing and aggrievement in response to general, non-media-specific citizen suit provisions, both in the common law and in administrative law.

In China, the year 2021 witnessed the further evolution of environmental protection and development of legislation and rulemaking. This included revision of the Law on the Prevention and Control of Noise Pollution and adoption of the Wetland Protection Law, the Regulations on Administration of Pollutant Discharge Permits, Measures for Administration of Carbon Emissions Trading, judicial interpretations on environmental injunctive orders, and some departmental rules. This Comment summarizes some of the year’s major developments.

Recent U.S. presidential administrations have been the apex of what scholars have identified as “the rise of executive-level power, the use of the ‘administrative presidency,’ and the growing democratic deficit.” Indeed, with legislative gridlock in the U.S. Congress that seems to have no end in sight, the use of agencies in the executive branch has been adopted by both political parties as the main vehicle of policymaking. This Comment acknowledges the ongoing regulatory uncertainty in the United States, categorizes it, and explores theoretical frameworks for presidential transitions.

A number of environmental justice screening tools and processes have been developed across the United States in an effort to identify communities experiencing environmental injustice.

Humans are inescapably dependent upon geological processes and structures. Many of these interactions are direct, such as when we cultivate the soil or mine the earth. However, the terms of our interaction with geology are usually invisible and unacknowledged. Although the relationships are complex, a firm understanding of the environment and our dependence on it cannot ignore the interconnections between earth’s systems, including subsurface geology, vegetation, oceans, and atmosphere.