Editors' Summary: NAFTA is one of the most comprehensive free trade agreements in history. Its negotiation coincided with a growing controversy about the relationship between trade and environmental policies. As a result, NAFTA contains unprecedented provisions to maintain and enhance health, safety, and environmental protection in nations that are party to the pact.
Editors' Summary: EPA and the Department of Justice are aggressively enforcing the criminal provisions of federal environmental laws. Companies and their officers are subject to large fines and jail terms if convicted. Corporate officers should be aware of a recent trend in RCRA criminal enforcement in which the Justice Department has attempted to hold corporate officers and chief executive officers criminally liable for the actions of their subordinates, even when the officers did not have actual knowledge of their employees' illegal conduct.
Editors' Summary: The Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community (EEC Treaty) was intended to create a unified European market. The 1987 Single European Act, which amended the EEC Treaty, provided the legal framework to achieve that goal by 1992, and added provisions for a common environmental policy. Despite recognition by European Community (EC) Member States of the need for a common environmental policy, EC environmental legislation has not been uniformly implemented and enforced in Member States.
Editors' Summary: Legal reforms are sweeping Central and Eastern Europe, including the drafting of new environmental laws. Advisors from western countries, including the United States, are trying to apply lessons learned during the past 20 years to the current law drafting effort. However, the history of environmental regulation and the economic transitions currently taking place make this process unique.
As important as is the outcome of the presidential race this November, environmental lawyers, lobbyists, and advocates who watch Congress are keenly aware that the simultaneous congressional elections on November 3 are key to the nature and success of an environmental agenda in the next two years.
Editors' Summary: Environmental issues often involve collective choice about the kind of society we want. Choosing a President and a Congress on November 3 is one way we make that choice.
With that in mind, the Environmental Law Reporter called the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. ELR asked each for the environmental platform positions adopted at the 1992 conventions. Reprinted below is what each party sent. ELR has not edited the text.
Editors' Summary: When Congress amended the Clean Air Act in 1990, it instituted a new approach to the regulation of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). Although EPA had great discretion in adopting HAP emission standards prior to 1990, the Agency promulgated standards for only seven substances in two decades. The 1990 amendments changed this by requiring EPA to establish emission standards for over 100 HAPs enumerated in amended Clean Air Act § 112.
Editors' Summary: The Antideficiency Act embodies the constitutional mandate that only Congress is empowered to appropriate public funds. The Act prohibits officers and employees of the United States from spending or contracting to spend funds which have not been duly appropriated by Congress. It therefore may serve to excuse the federal government's failure to comply with or enforce environmental statutes when Congress has not made a specific appropriation for that purpose.
Editors' Summary: Earlier this year, the Library of Congress released the papers of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. In so doing, it provided scholars with access to a remarkable record of the Court's inner-workings. Among the Marshall papers is an extensive collection of letters, memoranda, and draft opinions that the Justices exchanged on some of the most important cases of the last quarter century.
Editors' Summary: Modern environmental law in the United States is the product of public opinion. Until relatively recently, the public viewed America as a storehouse of virtually unlimited natural resources, and paid scant attention to the environmental consequences of industrial development. Beginning in the 1960s, however, that attitude changed.