I have spent most of my professional career involved in the practice of environmental law and have watched it expand and grow from a cottage industry in the sixties into a significant, diverse area of practice in the eighties. The dramatic growth in environmental law has stemmed, of course, from the enactment during this period of numerous environmental protection and resource management statutes. The 1970s began with the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act,¹ which was designed to encourage federal decisionmakers to focus on the environmental ramifications of their actions. Later in the decade, Congress not only reenacted the Clean Air Act² and the Clean Water Act,³ but also enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA),⁴ the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA),⁵ the Safe Drinking Water Act,⁶ the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA),⁷ and began developing the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA).⁸ I believe that no other area of law has expanded as dramatically in scope, coverage, and complexity over the past 15 years.

During this period of expansion of environmental law, the way we practice and use those statutes also has changed. One of the most obvious changes is that statutory schemes have become far more complex. The Clean Air Act is perhaps the best example of how a fairly complex statutory scheme has been made even more complex, placing severe demands upon the regulating agency and the regulated community. Similarly, we have witnessed dramatic expansion of accompanying regulatory regimes. The extremely complex regulations recently developed under RCRA provide a vivid example. Finally, if environmental law itself were not sufficiently perplexing, we have seen a blending of disparate legal concepts in environmental practice. For example, under CERCLA, general environmental and administrative law principles have been integrated with evolving tort concepts, a melding of administrative and common law principles that has posed significant challenges for both practitioners and the courts.