As our nation transitions into the Barack Obama Administration, we have the unique opportunity to work together to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and help protect our nation from the harmful impacts of climate change. We must develop and implement real solutions-- learning from the policies and programs already in place across the nation and the world.

There has, indeed, been a marked evolution in the investigation and prosecution of environmental crimes in New Jersey and around the United States since the inception 30 years ago of environmental law as we know it today. Just as criminal schemes that adversely impact public health and natural resources have become more sophisticated, so have the strategies and technologies employed by investigators to track down such criminal activity.

Throughout the 20th century, government agencies increasingly regulated the use of private land in the United States. In particular, zoning spread across the country as the principal regulatory tool for land use control. Although many citizens and commentators welcomed this trend as a means to protect property interests and the neighborhood environment, zoning has faced increased criticism in recent decades.

Editors' Summary: The demand for groundwater is projected to grow over the next 20 years, resulting in increasing requests for groundwater extraction permits. However, current groundwater allocation laws in some states are economically inferior for a number of reasons; therefore, these states may have difficulty meeting the growing demand for groundwater. In this Article, Kevin L. Brady reveals the reasons for inefficiency in groundwater allocation and management in Utah.

Not long ago, many members of Virginia's land use bar operated under the assumption that Virginia's Declaratory Judgment Act was the proper vehicle for challenging local land use decisions. The Virginia Declaratory Judgment Act provides that "[i]n cases of actual controversy, circuit courts within the scope of their respective jurisdictions shall have power to make binding adjudications of right.... Controversies involving the interpretation of...

In April of 2008, the Virginia Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Logan v. City Council of the City of Roanoke. In its unanimous decision, the court resolved an issue that was frequently contested in cases involving citizen challenges to local land use actions such as subdivision approvals. The question addressed in Logan was whether third-party neighboring landowners possessed a right-of-action to bring a socalled NIMBY lawsuit seeking to overturn the approval of a subdivision decision they opposed.

While causation is often a paramount obstacle to prosecuting a toxic tort claim, judicial interpretation of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) generally has eliminated consideration of causation of actual injury or harm. Generally, under CERCLA's strict liability regime, no showing of causation of actual injury or harm at a site is required for liability to attach.

A person unfamiliar with the intricacies of chemical regulation in the United States might assume that regulators are hard at work weeding out dangerous products, requiring warnings on thousands of others, and collecting copious toxicity research on the rest. In truth, however, the regulatory regime in the United States works nothing like this.

In her Article, Prof. Wendy Wagner takes on one of the core challenges of U.S. chemical management policy: how to assure that useful toxicity data is generated about chemicals in commerce. She offers a creative proposal for harnessing competitive instincts in companies to assure that such data are developed. As described below, there are important questions about whether this proposal will actually work in practice.

In Using Competition-Based Regulation to Bridge the Toxics Data Gap, Prof. Wendy Wagner offers a useful and provocative proposal intended to address the many shortcomings of current U.S. policy toward industrial chemicals. The proposal derives from a diagnosis of the root causes of these policy failings with which I wholeheartedly concur. The main elements of that critique are the following: