In its first week of business during the new millennium, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., and provided important clarifications about the law of standing in environmental citizen suits. Specifically, the Court rejected the narrow view of environmental injury-in-fact advocated by Justice Scalia and instead adhered to the broader view of injury-in-fact established in a nonenvironmental context by the Court's decision in Federal Elections Commission v. Akins.

As law students frequently discover during exams, the law of standing is easy to state but hard to apply. The basic rules are simple and well-settled. Under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, in order to invoke federal jurisdiction, the plaintiff must demonstrate the existence of an "injury-in-fact" that is "legally cognizable," "fairly traceable" to the defendant, and capable of being "redressed" by the court. Each of the terms in quotation marks seems clear enough on the surface but has proved remarkably tricky in practice.

adapted from Layla (by Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon)

What do we do when we get sued now

If the Supremes aren't on our side?

If we can't rely on standing constraints

Do they expect us to comply?

This Article investigates the murky regulatory world of stormwater pollution. Nonpoint source pollution has been described as the most significant water quality problem facing the United States. It is generally not subject to the primary enforcement mechanisms of the Clean Water Act (CWA). Stormwater is where the CWA's primary enforcement mechanisms, usually reserved for point sources, intersect with nonpoint pollution. Effective regulation of stormwater could go far toward controlling nonpoint sources of water pollution. However, the U.S.

Few, if any, issues have divided environmental lawyers more than the legitimacy of the Migratory Bird Rule (Rule). Ever since its adoption in 1986 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) as an assertion of federal authority over isolated wetlands, ostensibly for the sake of protecting migratory birds, the Rule had come to symbolize for some all that was wrong with either modern U.S.

In Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps) does not have authority under the Clean Water Act (the Act or the CWA) to regulate the filling of "other waters." This decision demonstrates a major shift in the Court's approach to statutory interpretation, particularly in the context of reviewing an agency's understanding of a statute. The significance of the case is best gauged by contrasting it with United States v.

For the last several years, federal circuit courts have debated the exact jurisdictional scope of §404 of the Clean Water Act (CWA), which authorizes the Secretary of the U.S. Army (the Army), acting through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps), to issue permits "for the discharge of dredged or fill material into the navigable waters at specified disposal sites." The circuit courts have based their debates on the assumption, well-supported by earlier CWA decisions, that Congress intended the term "navigable waters" within the CWA to extend to the limits of the U.S. Commerce Clause.

Environmentalists are no strangers to disappointment in the U.S. Supreme Court, but the recent case of Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (SWANCC) is particularly disappointing. First, it might be said that the impact of the opinion, in circumstances in which legislative amendment is virtually impossible, may be the most devastating judicial opinion affecting the environment ever.

This past January, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Clean Water Act (CWA) did not authorize the federal government to prohibit a landfill operator from filling isolated ponds on its property merely because the ponds were used as habitat by migratory birds. The National Association of Home Builders claimed that the decision in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S.

For over two decades, courts and agencies have assumed that the Clean Water Act (CWA) grants the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) jurisdiction over the nation's waters to the full extent of the U.S. Congress' authority under the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause. This belief led the Corps and EPA to assert CWA jurisdiction over virtually all waters in the nation, including navigable waters; non-navigable tributaries; adjacent wetlands; and non-navigable, isolated, intrastate waters and wetlands.