Editor's Summary: The United States saw a phenomenal period of wind installation in 2006, with over 3, megawatts of installed capacity added. Is this just another upswing in the boom-bust cycle of wind power in the United States? Alex Bandza offers an answer based on the histories of wind power and energy policy in three different countries. In this Article, he compares wind policies in Denmark, Germany, and the United States. Pulling from lessons learned from successes in the European countries, he suggests how future U.S.

Editors' Summary: On May 25, 2006, the Environmental Law Institute hosted the first seminar in a series exploring critical developments in toxic torts.

Editors' Summary: The OMB mandate for peer review of "information products" across the federal government, the Klamath Falls, Oregon, saga, and the legislative attempts to bind the regulatory arms of the ESA through peer review have sparked vigorous debate about the use of peer review in regulatory settings. In this Article, the first empirical treatment of the subject, J.B.

Editor's Summary: Creating law and policy for protection of the atmosphere is a complicated and contentious process. There are a great many stakeholders with different perspectives, and the federal government has taken a measured approach to responding to the evolving economic, technological, and scientific data on the state of the air in the United States and worldwide. Therefore, the states and the judiciary have taken on increasingly central roles as national policymakers in the areas of air pollution and climate change. In this Article, E. Donald Elliott, Bret C. Cohen, Ari G.

Editor's Summary: The federal courts of appeal are currently engaged in debate over the increase in probability of future harm that must be demonstrated by petitioners to establish a cognizable injury for Article III standing purposes. Two recent decisions in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C.) Circuit--one withdrawn and replaced by the other--may herald a new, quantitative approach to standing analysis with great implications for environmental law. In this Article, Cassandra Sturkie and Nathan Seltzer review these D.C.

Editors' Summary: Justice Antonin Scalia and others have described the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers'(the Corps') administration of the CWA §404 permitting process as burdensome and inefficient. Empirical data gathered from the Corps, however, do not bear out this assessment. In this Article, Kim Diana Connolly evaluates data collected from Corps Customer Service Surveys as well as the apparent disconnect between applicant experiences and the public's negative perception of the permitting process.

Editors' Summary: In this Article, Michael Allen Dymersky and Jesse J. Richardson Jr. examine the widespread rule of judicial review that a court should not consider evidence of motive in reviewing legislative actions by local government. They evaluate the rule in the context of a rezoning case in Highland County, Virginia, in which a group of plaintiffs conclusively established that improper motive prompted one supervisor to vote in favor of rezoning the subject property.

Editors' Summary: On February 21, 2007, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a seminar on law and policy for ecosystem services. After the moderator provided an overview of the challenges and opportunities for regulation of ecosystem services, the panelists shared their expertise on a range of topics surrounding this issue, including the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the economics of ecosystem services, differences between provisioning services and regulating services, and information and incentive programs for the private sector. Below is a transcript of the event.

Editors' Summary: Most popular and scholarly attention paid to biodiversity conservation has focused on federal efforts such as the ESA or international regimes like CITES. However, U.S. states have long taken action to protect biodiversity before the federal government. In this Article, Susan George discusses states'roles in biodiversity conservation, including jurisdictional issues and the authority upon which the states base their programs, new protection efforts, and what can be expected from states in the coming years.

Editors' Summary: Law and policy have traditionally lagged behind economics and ecology as fields addressing the value and protection of ecosystem services. Environmental lawyers and policymakers need to work to close the gap in ecologist- and economist-dominated discourse on these vital services. In this Article, Ira R. Feldman and Richard J. Blaustein examine the potential intersections of ecosystem services and law and policy. They discuss how economic considerations like valuation, scale, and uncertainty might figure in the policy opportunities for ecosystem services.