The September 2002 edition of the Environmental Law Reporter's (ELR's) News & Analysis published a truly remarkable Article: Could SWANCC Be Right? A New Look at the Legislative History of the Clean Water Act, by Virginia S. Albrecht and Stephen M. Nickelsburg. A casual reader of the Article might not understand how revolutionary and far-reaching the conclusions and analysis of that Article are, regarding the geographic jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act (CWA). In fact, the authors seem to go to some lengths to conceal the radical implications of their own conclusions while admitting that their Article does seek to overturn "long-entrenched assumptions" that the federal courts and agencies that implement the CWA have had for more than three decades regarding the extent of the CWA's geographic jurisdiction.

Read carefully and with an understanding of the subject matter, the Albrecht/Nickelsburg Article asserts the following: based on Albrecht's and Nickelsburg's interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, plus those authors' highly innovative reading of the legislative history of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA) of 1972, i.e., the first effective federal CWA, the geographic jurisdiction of the CWA at present is actually only a tiny fraction (my estimate is less than 1%) of what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps), and other federal agencies, plus most of the federal courts, had previously believed.