From Wednesday, January 3d, through Sunday, January 7th, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) held its 101st annual meeting in San Francisco. Among the numerous panel discussions, workshops, luncheons, receptions, and field trips that took place at that event was a lively and well-attended session (held on Friday, January 5th) entitled "Dinosaur or Phoenix?: Choosing Between Old-Fashioned Regulation and Second-Generation Strategies in the New Millennium."

The electricity crisis of 2001 produced more than rolling blackouts in California, skyrocketing prices throughout the West, and calls from the Bush Administration to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development. It also revealed that the historic imbalance between hydropower generation and salmon protection in the Columbia Basin remains a fixture of life in the Northwest.

I. Introduction

Introduction

How clean is clean? National policy on human health and ecological risk assessment has proceeded for some time on a precautionary approach to remediation requirements. Conservative assumptions on "safe" levels of exposure have created underlying assumptions of "clean up to background" levels of contamination as anything less would not guarantee safety for future residential use.

Notwithstanding that only a few agencies use regulatory negotiation¹ for a tiny minority of rules, the process attracts a remarkable amount of scholarly attention. While proponents claim that negotiation improves rule quality, reduces transaction costs, and increases legitimacy, critics contend that the process fails to deliver its purported benefits and abrogates an agency's responsibility to execute its delegated functions.

Anna Weiland was proud of herself. For the first time in her 43 years, she became involved with local government, speaking out for her rights, filing a complaint. . . . Red Canyon Quarry then filed a lawsuit against Weiland. . . . Weiland says she learned a hard lesson. . . .¹

The Pitfalls of Cross-Cultural Legal Capacity Building

The use of default assumptions in risk assessment originated in unusual conditions. In the early 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon had declared a war on cancer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was a new agency created to deal with environmental hazards. While cancer was a well-known problem, scientific understanding of its causes were limited, and experimental methods were in an early stage of development.

The process of protecting the environment is big business. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now the federal government's largest regulatory agency, with 18,000 employees and a budget of $ 7.8 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2001. Complying with the laws and regulations that EPA is charged with upholding is even bigger business.