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:

Editors' Summary

Editor's Summary: The recent reauthorization of the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act, the nation's primary transportation and funding planning statute, has caused some to question whether the Act fosters greater integration of transportation and community development. In this Article, Keith Bartholomew explores this issue. He begins with an explanation of the purpose of cities and how they necessitated transportation systems. He then discusses the history and principles of transportation planning policy.

Editors' Summary: On April 23, 2007, the Environmental Law Institute launched its Congressional Briefing series, a set of events designed to highlight and explicate critical areas of environmental law to policymakers. The first seminar in the series focused on regulation of mercury emissions from power plants.

Editors' Summary: U.S. courts have consistently ruled that navigable, intrastate waters are not traditional navigable waters unless they form part of a continued highway of interstate commerce. However, for purposes of its permitting duties pursuant to the CWA, the Corps has defined a broader set of traditional navigable waters that includes all navigable, intrastate waters, regardless of whether the waters meet the continued highway requirement. In this Article, David E. Dearing examines the case law supporting the continued highway requirement, including the recent U.S.