A district court denied environmental groups' motion for summary judgment in a lawsuit seeking FOIA disclosure of an EPA computer model related to its rollback of Obama-era greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicle manufacturers. The groups challenged EPA's withholding of the model pursuant to a...
An Idaho district court transferred venue in a challenge to BLM's decision to renew livestock grazing permits for an allotment in northern Utah and to the Interior Board of Land Appeals' (IBLA's) reinstatement of that decision. An environmental group argued that BLM's decision violated FLPMA and NEP...
The D.C. Circuit dismissed a challenge to a 2018 EPA memo that interpreted §112 of the CAA to mean that major sources of toxic emissions could reclassify to area sources and thereby ease their regulatory obligations. California and environmental groups argued that EPA failed to provide notice and c...
In an unpublished opinion, a state appellate court upheld the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources' rules under which the permit for a copper-nickel-platinum mine was issued. Environmental groups challenged the rules, asserting that they were constitutionally vague and unenforceable. The court ...
The Ninth Circuit upheld dismissal of a lawsuit challenging a set of agency decisions that reauthorized coal mining activities on lands reserved to the Navajo Nation. In the district court, environmental groups argued that the agencies failed to consider the impact of the mining on the environment a...
The U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump Administration's request to stay a district court order enjoining the use of military funds to build portions of a border wall along the Mexican border. The Court found that the government made a sufficient showing that nonprofit groups who filed suit had no ...
This Article explains that the conventional view of agency behavior—following the specific direction of the U.S. Congress or the president and using notice-and-comment rulemaking or adjudication processes—does not capture how public agencies and private entities develop innovative regulatory strategies and earn regulatory authority as a result. In particular, this Article explains how governmental agencies like the U.S.
For more than a century, energy rate setting has been used to promote public good and redistributive goals, akin to general financial taxation. Various non-tax subsidies in customer energy rates have enormous untapped potential for promoting low-carbon sources of energy, while also balancing broader economic and social welfare goals. This Article argues that, even though a carbon tax remains politically elusive, “carbon taxation by regulation” has begun to flourish as a way of financing carbon reduction.
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’ . . .