Editors' Summary: When Congress originally enacted CERCLA in 1980, it gave the state and federal governments a strong arsenal of tools to respond to actual or threatened releases of hazardous substances. CERCLA authorized state and federal governments to recover response costs and natural resource damages from responsible parties. However, CERCLA authorized only the federal government to obtain injunctive relief to compel responsible parties to perform remedial actions. States that were unwilling to spend their own money to clean up sites and later seek recovery from responsible parties were forced to rely on pendent jurisdiction and declaratory judgment actions to obtain prospective relief at CERCLA sites. The author reviews the methods that states pursued prior to SARA to obtain prospective relief. He then outlines how state-prosecuted actions should proceed after SARA, which gave states their own federal cause of action for injunctive relief.