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Protecting Wild Animal Abundance
No full textAmericans today encounter billions fewer wild animals than their grandparents did. These ongoing losses affect an enormous array of interests, including billions of dollars in costs to agriculture, tourism, and land management, as well as lost wildlife encounters. Dramatic declines in wild animal abundance reveal a blind spot in American law: In general, environmental law does not aim to protect the “supply” of wild animals we think of as common. Because scientists have only recently begun to appreciate the scale of common animal loss, the phenomenon has received comparatively little attention from legal scholars. This Article sets forth the problem of diminishing wild animal abundance. It documents the phenomenon’s scope and magnitude and argues that the law should seek to combat such losses. Losing common animals thwarts the goals underlying myriad environmental statutes. Wild animal abundance serves economic, cultural, and aesthetic interests. Moreover, valuing abundance aligns with emerging movements that assign intrinsic value to nature and individual animals. Having established that the law should change to protect wild animal abundance, this Article next tackles how. In the near term, legislative and regulatory changes to the operation of statutes such as the Endangered Species Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and National Environmental Policy Act could serve to protect wild animal abundance. In the long term, the law must change to better monitor wildlife, reconceptualize humanoccupied areas as multispecies spaces, and enable positive interventions in nature
Gorsuch’s Dissent and the Current State of Navajo Water Rights Claims
No full textWater rights have been a key feature of the Navajo Nation’s relationship with the United States. Since the time the Navajo were forcibly removed to the Bosque Redondo in the 1860s, the Tribe has fought for sufficient access to water. A key, but unfortunate, moment in this dispute came when the United States Supreme Court, in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, determined that the 1868 treaty between the United States and the Navajo Nation did not require the United States to take steps to secure water for the Tribe. The Navajo Nation is now on the cusp of settling its Colorado River water rights claims in Arizona and is currently awaiting Congressional action on a proposed settlement. This Note explores the Court’s decision in Arizona v. Navajo Nation and argues that the Court should have adopted the analysis Justice Gorsuch laid out in dissent. Additionally, challenges associated with the settlement process are discussed
The Dinosaur Age Is Over: The Case for Congressionally Reforming the General Mining Law of 1872
No full textBold legislative action is essential to modernize an outdated regulatory framework that no longer serves the public interest. By reforming the General Mining Law of 1872, the United States can advance towards a more sustainable and equitable future, leveraging its mineral resources to benefit all citizens and support the global transition to renewable energy. The urgency of this moment demands decisive action, as the implications for our environment and society are profound. Although Congress has not yet proven its capabilities in overcoming division and moving past legislative gridlock, it must rise to the occasion
IP @ the U - January 2026
No full textWelcome to IP @ the U, a periodic newsletter for students, alumni, faculty and friends of the University of Utah College of Law\u27s Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. This issue covers highlights from Fall 2025 and early Spring 2026.https://dc.law.utah.edu/history_docs/1010/thumbnail.jp
Prescribed Fire Liability and Administration in Western States: An Empirical Analysis and Call for Reform
No full textWildfires have grown exponentially over the last few years due to fuel loads, range- and timber-management policies, and climate change. The cost of fire suppression is also growing in both rural and urban areas. For instance, the 2016 Pioneer Fire in rural Idaho cost around $100 million to fight, while the 2025 urban conflagrations in Los Angeles, California destroyed over 16,000 structures despite an astonishing array of suppression resources deployed. Something new, and something big, in terms of law and policy interventions, is needed to stem the intensity of wildfires. Increasingly, governments, private citizens, and even corporate interests like insurance industries are looking to prescribed fire as a potential landscape-scale solution. Prescribed fires provide the kinds of fire that fire-adapted landscapes need to flourish, while wildfires can burn too intensely, scar the landscape, and provide an entry for invasive species. Prescribed fire lessens the intensity and prevalence of wildfires as well, which makes them more manageable. It also has the potential to reduce risk for homeowners and, as a result, place less strain on for-profit insurers and governmental insurers of last resort. The problem, however, is that a complex set of laws and antiquated liability standards make the broad deployment of prescribed fire challenging. This Article succinctly summarizes the major benefits of prescribed fire as well as the major legal problems that prohibit its broader deployment. It presents results from a first-of-its-kind empirical survey of 11 western states’ laws, administrative regulations, and case law governing prescribed fire with a specific focus on compliance with requirements of the Clean Air Act. It then 1) evaluates how each state uses some combination of common law liability standards to address liability in the prescribed fire context and 2) explores how states’ administrative processes try to encourage, or discourage, prescribed fire through a mix of certified burner programs, indemnity funds, and burn facilitation. The Article concludes by offering options for legal reforms at both the state and federal levels that could lead to the safe deployment of prescribed fire as a bulwark to prevent future out-of-control wildfires and the suppression costs that otherwise follow
Witness and Record on Complicity and Clergy Abuse
No full textThis first anthology assembles a multi-jurisdictional set of interviews to examine clergy abuse and institutional responses. The primary emphasis is Orthodoxy contexts and comparative discussion across religious settings. The core material consists of advocacy perspectives, firstperson accounts, and professional analyses. We need thoughtful clergy to speak out. The core problems: sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, power-asymmetrical relationships, and failure in impartial authoritative mechanisms of consequence, acting or even existing, in the first place
The Idea of Air
No full textHow we view air, especially clean air, has meaningful normative and practical implications. Today, it is commonly recognized as an exhaustible natural resource. But air was not always thought of as something to be conserved, developed, and used. This Article is the first to explore and interrogate that view. The shift to seeing air as a resource started in the first part of the twentieth century. Previously, air was characterized by its limitless supply of oxygen: a pure public good. Over time, the quality of that good changed, and a precious resource emerged. That resource—especially its chemical and physical characteristics—inspired a novel management concept and new approach to air pollution control (today considered the “pinnacle” of air pollution policy). Treating air as a resource offered a new way to imagine our relationship to air. Indeed, this Article argues that the conceptual origins of the modern Clean Air Act (particularly the air quality standards concept) are grounded in natural resources policy rather than in common law nuisance or in pollution’s externalities. But treating air and, more recently, our atmosphere as a resource also anchors our way of thinking to the natural-resource paradigm. The atmosphere, in particular, may be beyond sustainable use. Reimagining air may be necessary to address the worst impacts of a new problem for air: global climate change
Ultra Vires Review of Federal Agency Action Made Simple(r)
No full textThe law governing ultra vires review seeking injunctive relief to challenge statutory violations by federal agencies is a mess. Although administrative law generally limits judicial review to final actions, a substantial body of caselaw holds that this type of ultra vires review can reach interlocutory actions, vastly expanding judicial reach. Although administrative law now insists that federal courts must exercise independent judgment when reviewing agency statutory interpretations, caselaw limits this type of ultra vires review to correcting only the most spectacular statutory violations. In addition, caselaw ignores or garbles the problem of determining which types of plaintiffs qualify to invoke a cause of action for ultra vires review. Ultra vires review for injunctive relief to challenge statutory violations would make more sense if courts thought about it the same way they did back in 1946 when the Administrative Procedure Act was enacted. Under the well-understood framework of that time, a plaintiff could seek injunctive relief to redress a “legal wrong” caused by a “final” agency action in a suit in which the court could exercise independent judgment over issues of law. Students of administrative law will find this framework familiar because Congress basically codified it in the APA. By the transitive postulate, this Article’s proposal boils down to the idea that ultra vires review should work much like APA review did back in 1946. The confusion that burdens ultra vires review would largely disappear if courts remembered this basic equivalence
Keynote Address for the 2025 University of the Pacific Law Review Symposium: The Crime Victims\u27 Rights Movement: Historical Foundations, Modern Ascendancy, and Future Aspirations
Full text linkThis article, which serves as the keynote address for the 2025 University of Pacific Law Review Symposium, explores the past, present, and future of America\u27s crime victims\u27 rights movement-one of the most successful social movements in modern history.
Historically, crime victims played a central role in criminal justice processes through private prosecutions-i.e., the ability of victims to initiate or participate in criminal prosecutions. Today, while private prosecutions have been largely supplanted by public prosecutions, the victims\u27 rights movement has successfully restored the victims\u27 voice in criminal processes. The movement has reformed contemporary American criminal justice so that criminal processes now often include participatory rights for victims. As a result of state victims\u27 bills of rights, along with the federal Crime Victims\u27 Rights Act, victims play an important role in criminal cases. Because these rights for victims are participatory rights rather an entitlement to substantive case outcomes, the victims\u27 rights movement is not a carceral rights movement, aimed solely at securing punitive sentences. Instead, the movement focuses on giving a voice to crime victims in their own criminal cases. This laudable effort has drawn broad support across the country. Efforts to expand and amplify victims\u27 voices in criminal proceedings are justified and likely to continue into the future
Predicting Federal Third-Party Funding Regulation
Full text linkThird-party funding is a global phenomenon, although regulatory enforcement is local. Regulatory approaches vary widely from country to country and within countries, especially in federal legal systems, such as Canada, Australia, and the United States. The United States federal government is learning about third-party funding with an eye toward potential future regulation. Congress has been investigating funding, as evidenced by testimony in congressional hearings, proposed federal legislation, and a nonpartisan study on third-party funding by the Government Accountability Office. In addition, after more than a decade of observation, the United States Federal Civil Rules Advisory Committee recently formed a committee to explore whether to change the Federal Rules to address third-party funding. The United States federal government takes these steps against the patchwork quilt of conflicting and contrasting state regulations regarding third-party funding.
This Article explores how federalism affects third-party funding in the United States. Specifically, it explores the likely effects of future third-party funding regulation at the federal level in conjunction with existing state regulations. Moreover, this Article presents various benefits and drawbacks that the United States federal government should consider when deciding whether to regulate TPF directly. It predicts whether the United States federal government will regulate third-party funding and, if so, how. Finally, this Article concludes by suggesting avenues for future inquiry