Environmental laws seem to face, in the Rehnquist Court, a situation like that old silent movie serial "The Perils of Pauline." Environmental laws hardly ever seem to have even a single U.S. Supreme Court Term's respite from mortal danger, between Article III standing attacks on the citizen suit provisions, Takings Clause attacks on land use restrictions,¹ federalism or sovereign immunity attacks on provisions for government liability or restriction, and nondelegation doctrine attacks on regulatory provisions²—yet, with all this, the Court has not yet struck such laws a lethal blow.

Now, the Court's bombshell last spring in United States v. Morrison,³ building on the 1995 doctrinal turnaround in United States v. Lopez,⁴ threatens the environmental laws from yet another direction: the U.S. Commerce Clause.⁵ The problem arises not so much from the narrow holding of either case, since neither case involved environmental laws: Morrison struck down the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and Lopez struck down a drugs-near-schools provision, neither even remotely resembling an environmental law.