The Joseph Biden Administration has signaled an interest in ensuring that regulations appropriately benefit vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. Prior presidential administrations have focused on ensuring that regulations are efficient, maximizing the net benefits to society, without considering who benefits or who loses from these policies. Supporters of the current process are concerned that pursuing equity will come at significant cost to efficiency and ultimately leave everyone worse off. This framework—efficiency versus equity—is misguided and counterproductive in many cases. Caroline Cecot's Efficiency and Equity in Regulation, 76 Vand. L. Rev. 361 (2023), from which this abstract is adapted, proposes two rules of thumb for agencies to follow in order to promote both equity and efficiency using their existing authorities and avoid lose-lose scenarios.

This Comment touches on some of the key concerns that Dave Owen's The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law raised about equity and transparency in environmental law, and shares a couple of examples that have emerged in the last few months that people are inventing to try to address this.

Black letter law is implemented in countless shades of gray, with interpretation and negotiation at virtually every step of the way. Prof. Dave Owen’s The Negotiable Implementation of Environmental Law digs deep, beyond the obvious, to underscore that negotiation is not a dark art but a necessary skill that deserves more attention and training. He catalogs the importance, prevalence, and pitfalls of negotiation, providing examples of what is negotiable, when and by whom, how it happens and what results, and whether it can be good or bad on the scale of rigid “command and control” versus flimsy “slippage.” Professor Owen’s analysis is thorough and balanced on the “centrality of negotiation” and how it impacts outcomes in the world of standards, permits, cleanup, conservation, and enforcement. He also underscores the value of and need for improving the transparency, effectiveness, and equity of negotiation, particularly in state agencies.