Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
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Environmental Principles in U.S. and Canadian Law
Get PDFPublished as Chapter 29 in Principles of Environmental Law, Ludwig Krämer & Emanuela Orlando, eds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1369/thumbnail.jp
Climate Change Challenges for Land Conservation: Rethinking Conservation Easements, Strategies, and Tools
Get PDFClimate change has significant consequences for land conservation. Government agencies and nonprofit land trusts heavily rely on perpetual conservation easements. However, climate change and other dynamic landscape changes raise questions about the effectiveness and adaptability of permanent conservation instruments like conservation easements. Building upon a study of 269 conservation easements and interviews with seventy conservation-easement professionals in six different states, we examine the adaptability of conservation easements to climate change. We outline four potential approaches to enhance conservation outcomes under climate change: (1) shift land-acquisition priorities to account for potential climate change impacts; (2) consider conservation tools other than perpetual conservation easements; (3) ensure that the terms of conservation easements permit the holder to adapt to climate change successfully; and (4) provide for more active stewardship of conservation lands. There is still a good deal of uncertainty as to the legal fate of a conservation easement that no longer meets its original purposes. Many state laws provide that conservation easements can be modified or terminated in the same manner as traditional easements. Yet conservation easements are in many ways unlike other easements. The beneficiary is usually the public, not merely a neighboring landowner, and the holder is always a nonprofit conservation organization or a government agency. Thus, there is a case to be made for adaptive protection. An overly narrow focus on perpetual property rights could actually thwart efforts to meet adaptation needs over the long term. We call for careful attention to ensuring conservation outcomes in dynamic landscapes over time
Understanding the Complicated Landscape of Civil War Monuments
Get PDFThis essay examines the controversy regarding confederate monuments and attempts to contextualize this debate within the current preservation framework. While much attention has been paid to this topic over the past year, particularly with regard to “public” monuments, such discussion has generally failed to recognize the varied and complicated property law layers involved—which can fundamentally change the legal requirements for modification or removal. We propose a spectrum or framework for assessing these resources ranging from public to private, and we explore the messy space in-between these poles where most monuments actually fall. By highlighting these categories, we provide an initial introduction of a typology for evaluating confederate monuments, serving as a foundation for an exploration into the nature of property law and monument protection
E-Notice
Get PDFSocial media platforms and smartphone manufacturers face class action lawsuits, but how open are federal courts to using these very technologies to notify members of a class action? This Article details the results from an empirical analysis of over 2700 federal class notice decisions. It finds class notice changing, but very slowly. Supreme Court precedent demands a dynamic standard for class action notice. However, fears of change, technology, and imprecision keep courts tethered to twentieth-century modes of communication. This judicial fear encumbers E-Notice—at a cost to the utility of class action procedures
Parallel Enforcement and Agency Interdependence
Get PDFParallel civil and criminal enforcement dominates public enforcement of everything from securities regulation to immigration control. The scholarship, however, lacks any structural analysis of how parallel enforcement differs from other types of interagency coordination. Drawing on original interviews with prosecutors, regulators, and white-collar defense attorneys, this Article is the first to provide a realistic presentation of how parallel enforcement works in practice. It builds on this descriptive account to offer an explanatory theory of the pressures and incentives that shape parallel enforcement. The Article shows that, in parallel proceedings, criminal prosecutors lack the gatekeeping monopoly that traditionally defines their relationships with investigating agents. This constitutive feature of parallel proceedings explains many of the institutional design choices that shape our regimes of overlapping civil and criminal enforcement
