Editors' Summary: On June 19, 1986, President Reagan signed the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1986 into law. Among the many changes made by the Amendments, three stand out. First, EPA must issue drinking water standards for a significantly increased number of contaminants. Second, the Amendments strengthen the Act's enforcement provisions by giving EPA authority to issue administrative orders and by the addition of language providing that EPA "shall" take enforcement action in certain situations. Third, the Amendments establish two new groundwater protection programs.

While there are undoubtedly fascinating stories of the dynamics that shaped the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA) waiting to be written, interpretation of SARA as a statute must be governed by its language, by relevant legislative history in the committee reports, and to some extent by the legislative debates. The volume of this material is daunting.

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA)¹ requires federal agencies to take into account the effects of their undertakings on properties eligible for or listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

With the 100th Congress taking its place in Washington, now may be an appropriate time for the environmental community, broadly defined, to consider the increasingly contentious relationship which has evolved between the Congress and the executive branch on environmental matters. Indeed, the "relationship" has become more akin to a series of confrontations in which the greatest uncertainty is whether any specific incident might lead the Congress to precipitate legislative action.

Editors' Summary: Environmental statutes frequently leave important policy and implementation issues to subsequent rulemaking by the Environmental Protection Agency. In practice, however, the EPA does not have a free hand in promulgating regulations; it has often needed to convince the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of the wisdom of its proposals. In this article, the author outlines the legal basis of OMB involvement and describes the strengths and weaknesses flowing from OMB's authority.

[R]emember that statutes always have some purpose or object to accomplish, whose sympathetic and imaginative discovery is the surest guide to their meaning.

Judge Learned Hand¹

Editors' Summary: In the second of a three-part series, Ms. Halper, an assisant attorney general for the state of New York, analyzes the question of land ownership, land use, and causation in the context of the state public nuisance action to remedy environmental damage. The article argues that the use of land, rather than ownership, is the key to liability in the public nuisance context, and compares this to the traditional private nuisance action. The final article in this series will discuss defenses that may be raised.

Editors' Summary: The number of citizen suits brought by environmental groups under the Clean Water Act against companies that have allegedly violated the terms of their NPDES permits has increased dramatically in recent years. Spurred in part by district court decisions that have found defendants liable for violations of the Act solely on the basis of the data reported in the permittees' own discharge monitoring reports, environmental groups have scored several stunning victories.

The Soviet Union is the first country in which socialism as a philosophical concept has become a reality. Now the USSR is developing with the hope for a better future not only for its own people, but also for mankind. However, this development is not a smooth one. Going this way, we meet difficulties, we make miscalculations, and sometimes we are simply mistaken. Sometimes we go faster, but sometimes we go slower.

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA),¹ as amended by the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA),² covers the cleanup of "releases" of radioactive materials from federal and private facilities into the environment. In addition, certain provisions of SARA that do not amend CERCLA also apply to radioactive materials. This dialogue explores the extent to which these laws apply to radioactive materials and the limited exemptions for such materials in these statutes.