In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress enacted a vast body of legislation to protect the environment and individual health and safety. Collectively, this legislation is known as “risk regulation” because it addresses the risk of harm that technology creates for individuals and the environment. In the last two decades, this legislation has come under increasing attack by critics who employ utilitarian philosophy and cost-benefit analysis. The defenders of this body of risk regulation, by contrast, have lacked a similar unifying theory. In this book, the authors propose that the American tradition of philosophical pragmatism fills this vacuum. They argue that pragmatism offers a better method for conceiving of and implementing risk regulation than the economic paradigm favored by its critics. While pragmatism offers a methodology in support of risk regulation as it was originally conceived, it also offers a perspective from which this legislation can be held up to critical appraisal. The authors employ pragmatism to support risk regulation, but pragmatism also leads them to agree with some of the criticisms against it, and even to level new criticisms of their own. In the end, the authors reject the picture—painted by risk regulation’s critics—of widely excessive and irrational regulation, but the pragmatic perspective also leads them to propose a number of recommendations for useful reforms to risk regulation.

A pioneering model for constructing and assessing government authority and achieving policy goals more effectively Regulation is frequently less successful than it could be, largely because the allocation of authority to regulatory institutions, and the relationships between them, are misunderstood. As a result, attempts to create new regulatory programs or mend under-performing ones are often poorly designed. Reorganizing Government explains how past approaches have failed to appreciate the full diversity of alternative approaches to organizing governmental authority. The authors illustrate the often neglected dimensional and functional aspects of inter-jurisdictional relations through in-depth explorations of several diverse case studies involving securities and banking regulation, food safety, pollution control, resource conservation, and terrorism prevention. This volume advances an analytical framework of governmental authority structured along three dimensions—centralization, overlap, and coordination. Camacho and Glicksman demonstrate how differentiating among these dimensions better illuminates the policy tradeoffs of organizational alternatives, and reduces the risk of regulatory failure. The book also explains how differentiating allocations of authority based on governmental function can lead to more effective regulation and governance. The authors illustrate the practical value of this framework for future reorganization efforts through the lens of climate change, an emerging and vital global policy challenge, and propose an “adaptive governance” infrastructure that could allow policy makers to embed the creation, evaluation, and adjustment of the organization of regulatory institutions into the democratic process itself.

Modern Public Land Law in a Nutshell

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Momentum for Chesapeake Bay restoration has advanced significantly in the past two years, shaped by the combination of President Obama's Chesapeake Bay Protection and Restoration Executive Order and the EPA's Bay-wide Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) process. These federal initiatives, taken in partnership with the Bay states, required the Bay states and the District of Columbia to submit Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs) to demonstrate how they will meet the pollution targets in the applicable TMDLs. In August, the Center for Progressive Reform sent the Chesapeake Bay watershed jurisdictions (Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia) metrics by which our panel of water quality experts would judge the strength of the plans; we also submitted comments to the states in November on their draft plans. The states' final plans were submitted to EPA in November and December. The state plans fail to provide a specific roadmap for restoring the Bay, CPR says today in Missing the Mark in the Chesapeake Bay: A Report Card for the Phase I Watershed Implementation Plans (press release). The report was written by CPR Member Scholars William Andreen, Robert Glicksman, and Rena Steinzor, and CPR executive director Shana Jones and policy analyst Yee Huang. Our report found that the state plans all underperformed, to varying degrees, on the two primary areas for evaluation: transparency of information and strength of program design. While improvements from the drafts, the final plans were light on providing specific commitments for actions needed to achieve the required pollution reductions, and generally did not pledge dedicated funding for the proposed programs. The plans generally did not establish a baseline for existing programs' effectiveness to allow the public to monitor future performance in implementing the pollution reduction controls.

This book integrates the fields of economics and law to empirically examine compliance with regulatory obligations under the Clean Water Act (CWA). It examines four dimensions of federal water pollution control policy in the United States: limits imposed on industrial facilities' pollution discharges; facilities' efforts to comply with pollution limits, identified as "environmental behavior"; facilities' success at controlling their discharges to comply with pollution limits, identified as "environmental performance"; and regulators' efforts to induce compliance via inspections and enforcement actions, identified as "government interventions." The authors gather and analyze data on environmental performance and government interventions from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) databases, and data on environmental behavior gathered from their own survey of all 1,612 chemical manufacturing facilities permitted to discharge wastewater in 2002. By analyzing links between critical elements in the puzzle of enforcement of and compliance with environmental protection laws, the text speaks to several important, policy-relevant research questions: Do government interventions help induce better environmental behavior and/or better environmental performance? Do tighter pollution limits improve environmental behavior and/or performance? And, does better environmental behavior lead to better environmental performance?

Using Developing Professional Skills: Environmental Law as a supplement to your regular casebook makes it easy to integrate skills training into the classroom.

This book analyzes all significant aspects of management of lands and resources owned by the federal government, focusing on the national parks, the national forests, the national wildlife refuges, and the remaining public lands. It provides a brief historical overview of public land law in the United States and analyzes the constitutional basis for ownership and regulation of federal lands and natural resources. It covers the statutory basis for determining appropriate uses for federal lands and for assessment of the environmental impacts of activities on those lands. It also analyzes the rules governing planning and management of the water, mineral, timber, range, wildlife, recreation, and preservation resources on federal lands. Finally, it covers important recent public land law developments -- in Congress, in the land management agencies, and in the courts.