Do-It-Yourself biology, 3D printing, and the sharing economy are equipping ordinary people with new powers to shape their biological, physical, and social environments. This phenomenon of distributed innovation is yielding new goods and services, greater economic productivity, and new opportunities for fulfillment. Distributed innovation also brings new environmental, health, and security risks that demand oversight, yet conventional government regulation may be poorly suited to address these risks.

Cities often test the existing limits of their regulatory authority in areas like environmental protection, labor and employment, and immigration. The last few years witnessed an explosion of preemptive state legislation attacking, challenging, and overriding municipal ordinances across a wide range of policy areas. But this hostility to city government is not new. In 1915, one professor observed that “the relations of states to metropolitan cities in this country is ‘a history of repeated injuries’ .  .  .

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of some of the most creative and feasible environmental law and policy proposals from the legal academic literature each year. The pool of articles that are considered includes all environmental law articles published during the previous academic year.

Does the duty of environmental protection belong in the ethical rules for our profession? A number of scholars have explored whether lawyers should bear such duties. But little attention has focused on the possibility that “green ethics” would also be appropriate for judges. Rules of judicial ethics frame the manner in which judges take account of environmental concerns. At present, these rules provide very little guidance that is relevant to environmental matters.

Prof. Richard L. Revesz and Dr. Burcin Unel provide a useful, albeit no longer current, review of electric energy storage in Managing the Future of the Electricity Grid: Energy Storage and Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Managing). The energy storage market has continued its rapid technical and manufacturing evolution. Those advances may reasonably be expected to impact today’s regulatory aims and frameworks, just as prior technological progress influenced administrative goals and processes.

In their paper, Managing the Future of the Electricity Grid: Energy Storage and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Richard L. Revesz and Burcin Unel of New York University School of Law (NYU team or authors) highlight a critical (and often times contentious) issue that the energy industry is attempting to address: how to quantify and incorporate a societal value of decreased greenhouse gas emissions into the dollar value of incremental energy that is provided to the electric system.

The view that promoting the use of energy storage systems produces environmentally attractive results has been standard in policy circles. Policymakers have been enthusiastic about energy storage systems primarily because of their belief that cheaper and more prevalent storage options could help facilitate the integration of increased renewable energy generation and speed up the transition to a low-carbon grid. This beneficial outcome, however, is not guaranteed.

Cities have become a critical source of innovation across a wide array of policy areas that advance inclusion, equitable opportunity, and social justice. In the absence of state and federal action, cities and other local governments have taken the lead in enacting minimum wage and paid sick leave policies, expanding the boundaries of civil rights, tackling public health challenges, responding to emerging environmental threats, and advancing new technologies.

Our planet is hurtling toward dramatic and devastating impacts from climate change caused in large part by our reliance on fossil fuels. Meanwhile, liberalized trading rules have promoted a global economy heavily reliant on trade, which itself increases greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Prof. Timothy Meyer has written a thought-provoking article about how governments selectively enforce trade laws in ways that undermine environmental interests. He argues trade enforcement against products with social benefits (i.e., renewable energy and farmed fish) slows their development and results in an implicit subsidy for products with social costs (i.e., fossil fuels and wild-caught fish)—at the expense of products with social benefits.