On January 26, 2024, the Biden Administration announced a pause on pending decisions on permits to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) to non-free trade agreement countries until the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) updates underlying analyses for the authorizations. The United States is the largest global exporter of LNG, and its exports have rapidly grown over recent years. The pause presents an opportunity to review impacts of increased LNG export, including climate consequences, environmental justice harms, and more.

This abstract, which is adapted from Michele Okoh, Forgotten Waters, 111 Geo. L.J. 723 (2022), argues that approaches to addressing access to safe drinking water must account for the legacy of discrimination and discusses why the Rural Electrification Act provides a promising model to provide safe drinking water to well-dependent populations.

This abstract, which is adapted from Alexander Gouzoules, Going Concerns and Environmental Concerns: Mitigating Climate Change Through Bankruptcy Reform, 62 B.C. L. Rev. 2169 (2022), examines how legislative reforms to the Bankruptcy Code could mitigate the effects of climate change, speed the adoption of renewable energy, and contribute to the United States’ compliance with the Paris Agreement of 2015.

The Joseph Biden Administration has signaled an interest in ensuring that regulations appropriately benefit vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. Prior presidential administrations have focused on ensuring that regulations are efficient, maximizing the net benefits to society, without considering who benefits or who loses from these policies. Supporters of the current process are concerned that pursuing equity will come at significant cost to efficiency and ultimately leave everyone worse off. This framework—efficiency versus equity—is misguided and counterproductive in many cases.

This Article, which is adapted from Goran Dominioni & Daniel C. Esty, Designing Effective Border Carbon Adjustment Mechanisms: Aligning the Global Trade and Climate Change Regimes, 65 Ariz. L. Rev. 1 (2023), proposes a taxonomy of approaches to comparing climate policies implemented in the importing and the exporting countries and analyzes their relative strengths.

This Comment touches on some of the key concerns that Dave Owen's The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law raised about equity and transparency in environmental law, and shares a couple of examples that have emerged in the last few months that people are inventing to try to address this.

Black letter law is implemented in countless shades of gray, with interpretation and negotiation at virtually every step of the way. Prof. Dave Owen’s The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law digs deep, beyond the obvious, to underscore that negotiation is not a dark art but a necessary skill that deserves more attention and training.

Dave Owen's The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law did a nice job of highlighting some of the major statutes that are the backbone of our practice and the launching point for effective negotiation. One of the implications of the article that highlights the axiom “wake up . . . people are negotiating” is to understand that promulgation of the law by regulations is not the end point.

In theoretical accounts of environmental law, traditional environmental-law education, and much of the discourse of environmental-law implementation, negotiation is absent, except in a few celebrated and seemingly exceptional settings. When scholars and policy advocates do address the roles of negotiation, they tend to default to two competing conceptions. In one—the “command-and-control” view—environmental law is problematically centralized and rigid, and negotiation exists only in exceptional circumstances.

What this Comment found so compelling in Deals in the Heartland: Renewable Energy Projects, Local Resistance, and How Law Can Help was the human factor—the authors could have written the same article about what is going on in solar, biodigesters, hydro projects, or trash-to-energy projects. There is a good amount of research that could be done as to why this has cropped up recently. The human stories in the article are heartbreaking—this issue is dividing families, and people are being effectively excommunicated from their churches because of what side they are on.