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Four Perspectives on a Sustainable Future in Nosara, Costa Rica
Get PDFThe town of Nosara on Costa Rica’s Nicoya peninsula is home to a vibrant community of diverse residents and is adjacent to an important turtle nesting site. However, tensions between lifelong residents, more recent transplants, visitors, and developers have increased as more of the world discovers this once-isolated haven. Climate change, income inequality, and alienation from a distant government apparatus have further complicated effective land-use planning and fractured social cohesion. Using a mixed-method approach of in-depth interviews (n = 67), Q methodology (n = 79), and public deliberation (n = 88), we explored residents’ priorities for the future of their town. The results indicate four different perspectives on Nosara’s future. Despite the tensions among those four perspectives, they show consensus on one overarching community issue: the need for a sustainable development plan. The case also shows how Q-methodology can assist scholars and practitioners who embrace participatory approaches to policy development and conflict resolution in the environmental arena
Promoting Regulatory Prediction
Get PDFIt is essential for environmental protection that private actors be able to anticipate government regulation. If, for instance, the Biden Administration is planning to tighten regulations of greenhouse gas emissions, it is imperative that private companies anticipate this regulatory change now, not a few years from now after they have constructed even more coal- and gas-fired power plants. Those additional power plants will mean more irreversible greenhouse gases, and these plants can be politically challenging to shutter once built. The point is general to private actors making decisions in the shadow of potential government regulation. Better information about future government actions is thus critical for the benefit of both private actors and society at large. In this Article, we consider market-based and non-market-based means by which to generate information about future government action. We find no perfect answer.
We consider three market-based solutions—prediction markets, the use of equity markets to hedge against future government action, and machine-learning and predictive technologies—and three government-based solutions—greater transparency, the development of intellectual property rights in predictive information, and prediction-forcing regulation, which is regulation that requires private actors to make public predictions about future government action. None of these is a panacea. The market-based solutions founder on the limitations and thinness of markets. Government-based solutions come with significant structural downsides related to the division of authority among different levels of government (federal versus state versus local) and different branches of government at each level (executive versus legislative). We conclude that prediction-forcing regulation may be the most promising avenue, though it too is likely not a full solution
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Dangers of Environmental Protections Waivers
Get PDFWhen enacting both statutory and regulatory environmental protections, Congress and various agencies have recognized that emergency situations could arise that would require flexibility in the application and enforcement of those protections. Incorporating waivers into such protections provides that flexibility. However, the current state of waivers leaves them vulnerable to abuse. In this Note, I explore how a lack of procedural and substantive safeguards allows the inappropriate use of waivers to further administrative agendas in a way that poses serious risks to both environmental and human health. I then suggest remedial measures available to Congress that would strengthen environmental protections while still allowing for effective responses to emergencies
Aggregate Stare Decisis
Get PDFThe fate of stare decisis hangs in the wind. Different factions of the Supreme Court are now engaged in open debate—echoing decades of scholarship—about the doctrine’s role in our constitutional system. Broadly speaking, two camps have emerged. The first embraces the orthodox view that stare decisis should reflect “neutral principles” that run orthogonal to a case’s merits; otherwise, it will be incapable of keeping the law stable over time. The second argues that insulating stare decisis from the underlying merits has always been a conceptual mistake. Instead, the doctrine should focus more explicitly on the merits—by diagnosing the magnitude of past error and allowing “egregiously wrong” decisions to be dismantled without constraint.
This Article develops a compromise approach: an “aggregate voting rule,” requiring the combined vote across both courts—the one that crafted the holding at t1 and the one scrutinizing it at t2—to total a majority. In other words, the durability of past decisions should depend on the amount of support they were originally able to command. This would capture the main appeal of reform position—the idea that stare decisis should not preclude the correction of significant missteps—but also retain the core of stability that defines the orthodox view. Under the latter, the ideal of respect for precedent drives the doctrine’s content. Under an aggregate voting rule, the same ideal would express itself, instead, in the doctrine’s mechanical structure—freeing judges to focus on the merits, without abandoning the (non-merits) values that have long animated stare decisis. This would facilitate the airing out of disagreement and the forward motion of law, while also encouraging judges to locate avenues of doctrinal compromise
Administrative Investigations
Get PDFThis Article establishes the subject of federal administrative investigations as a new area of study in administrative law. While the literature has addressed investigations by specific agencies and congressional investigations, there is no general account for the trans-substantive constitutional value of administrative investigations. This Article provides such an account by exploring the positive law, agency behaviors, and constraints pertaining to this unresearched field. It concludes with some urgency that the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946—the statute that stands as a bill of rights for the Administrative State—does not serve to regulate administrative investigations and that Article III courts have held that such agency behavior is essentially unreviewable since the mid-twentieth century. It identifies the historical guideposts of administrative investigations and analyzes the substantial power agencies wield when they investigate. It surveys and analyzes the limiting principles in law that operate as nominal constraints to unlawful administrative investigative behavior. This Article concludes by considering procedural and substantive constraints that could be implemented to align agency investigations with constitutional and statutory norms without sacrificing their ability to fulfill their critical missions for the American public
The Evolution of Pro Bono Legal Services in Nigeria
No full textProfessor Krishnan\u27s contribution to this volume is chapter 14 The Evolution of Pro Bono Legal Services in Nigeria, co-authored by Kunle Ajagbe.https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facbooks/1295/thumbnail.jp
