3394 research outputs found
Sort by
The BLM’s Duty to Incorporate Climate Science into Permitting Practices and a Proposal for Implementing a Net Zero Requirement into Oil and Gas Permitting
Get PDFAlmost one quarter of all U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions come from fossil fuels extracted from public lands, and these resources are managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). This article argues that the BLM has a statutory duty to respond to climate change, which includes the duty to avoid exacerbating climate change. The article then moves the legal discussion from aspiration to action by proposing a legal strategy, using the existing legal framework, by which the BLM can achieve net zero emissions from all new mineral development activity. While the article focuses on oil and gas development, the same methodology could be applied to coal mining, tar sands, and other sources of GHG emissions
Identifying Barriers in USDA Programs and Services; Advancing Racial Justice and Equity and Support for Underserved Communities at USDA
Get PDFOn July 19, 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a notice in the Federal Register seeking input from the public on how USDA can advance racial justice and equity for underserved communities as part of its implementation of Executive Order 13985. This letter responds to the agency’s request. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) provides a number of programs that could improve access to clean drinking water for Tribes. While these programs have improved conditions for some tribes, several barriers exist which prevent Tribes from fully realizing the benefits of these programs. Our comments recommend: (1) removing the underwriting requirement for tribal applicants for 306(c) grants; (2) implementing a scoring factor to assign points for projects that serve Native American homes lacking drinking water or sanitation; (3) increasing per-project award limitations; and (4) improving the technical assistance and training programs available to Tribes
Supported Decisions as the Patient’s Own?
Get PDFThis brief commentary addresses what I regard as the thorniest challenge to supported decision making: how to determine if a supported decision really is the decision of the supported person, rather than an insidious form of concealed paternalism or conflicts of interest. The risk that apparent supported decision-making really becomes the decision of the supporter looms as capacities wane. Peterson, Karlawash and Largent (PK&L), who offer a defense of supported decision making in health care for people with dynamic and diminishing capacity, are alert to these problems but skirt their implications. The authors’ model for supported decisionmaking is incomplete; at a minimum, it should be supplemented by substantive guidance for supporters given by persons who anticipate diminishing capacity
Stereotypes, Sexism and Superhuman Faculty
Get PDFThis symposium article explores how law professors with caretaking responsibilities struggled so greatly during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because legal academia prioritizes masculine ideals of competence over warmth, faculty were expected to suppress their emotions and mental health needs in order to maintain the appearance of competence. While students were allowed to be seen as vulnerable individuals needing accommodations, we did not extend this same compassion to our faculty colleagues. To explain why the treatment was so disparate, I incorporated existing research on the stereotype content model (SCM) and psychological theories of dehumanization. These theories help to explain why many faculty with young children suffered in crushing silence during the pandemic while taking on new and overwhelming caregiving obligations
Living in Two Worlds
Get PDFAnti-racism calls us to work toward ending racial hatred, bias, systemic racism, and the oppression of marginalized groups. For many of us working in higher education leadership, this means that we are actively creating space for marginalized voices both in classrooms and through research. But who should be included is not always a question with a clear answer. Additionally, because of the complexity of identity, not all members of a marginalized community may express themselves in a monothetic way. This essay examines such a group possessing a complex identity – Indigenous people, from my personal lived experience. The essay explores how Native identity intersects with higher education leadership in complex ways. Ultimately, while Native identity within the United States is complicated, we should not shy away from these conversations about identity, as our communities and institutions are ultimately better following such critical examination
Indigenous fire stewardship: Federal/Tribal partnerships for wildland fire research and management
No full textOver millennia, many indigenous and Tribal peoples in North America\u27s fire-prone ecosystems developed sophisticated relationships with wildland fire that continue today. This article introduces philosophical, conceptual, and operational approaches to working with American Indians through research and management partnerships in the fields of wildland fire, forestry, and fuels, with applications to climate change and forest landscape restoration strategies. Of central importance are respectful collaborative relationships among the various parties (Tribes, agencies, organizations, academics, and citizens) that seek to integrate both indigenous and Western knowledge systems into environmental stewardship practices. Cultural fire regimes and indigeous people as fire depentent cultures is discussed
4°C
No full textConventional climate change wisdom tells governments to plan for a 2°C increase in global average temperature. However, increasingly robust science indicates that the planet is well on its way to at least 4°C of warming, possibly by the end of the 21st century or shortly thereafter. That much warming is a governance game changer, taking the multiple and interconnected complex systems that define U.S. society across thresholds and tipping points into cascades of transformational change. Critically, these systems potentially include the United States’ system of government—the key system that must successfully adapt to the coming changes in order for the country as a whole to have any chance of adapting peacefully, equitably, and productively to systemic transformation while still remaining a democracy.
This Article seeks to push U.S. climate change adaptation policy toward an entirely new mode of governance necessary to meet the challenges ahead. It does so by making five novel arguments. First, it assembles recent scientific climate change studies to show that a 4°C warmer future is currently the planet’s most likely trajectory. Second, it argues that being on that trajectory necessitates the dissociation of climate change mitigation and adaptation goals so that adaptation policy is free to address this more dire future. Third, it summarizes recent science to demonstrate that 4°C of warming poses a categorically different adaptation challenge than 2°C, as in situ adaptation becomes increasingly impossible, inducing both species and large numbers of people to migrate within U.S. boundaries. Fourth, to deal with these migrations and their attendant needs and consequences, this Article describes both a new mode of climate change adaptation, called “redesign” adaptation, and the governance tools available to coordinate, promote, and guide the equitable and productive resettlement of the United States. Finally, the Article argues that the United States, with strong leadership and funding from the federal government, needs to initiate anticipatory governance practices now to facilitate redesign adaptation in the future, beginning with a new national foresight research program
National Security Policymaking in the Shadow of International Law
Get PDFScholars have long debated whether and how international law impacts governmental behavior, even in the absence of coercive sanction. But this literature does not sufficiently address the possible impact of international law in the area of national security policymaking. Yet, policies that the executive branch purports to adopt as a wholly discretionary matter may still be heavily influenced by international legal norms, regardless of whether or not those norms are formally recognized as legally binding. And those policies can be surprisingly resilient, even in subsequent administrations. Moreover, because they are only seen as discretionary policies, they may be more easily adopted than formal legal interpretations. For all of these reasons, the impact of international law on national security policymaking is a crucial unexplored area in the debate about the efficacy of international law.
This Article describes how the norms and values embedded in international human rights law can sometimes be adopted, if not as a matter of formal law at the international level, then as a matter of official policy and practice. In addition, it surveys the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach, using two different Obama administration counterterrorism policies and Trump administration successor policies as case studies. Ultimately, I argue that the emergence and persistence of such policies is evidence of international law’s constraining impact. International law, it turns out, casts a long shadow as its paradigms get translated into policy. I also analyze the attributes of these policies, including their “legalistic” character and the consequences of creating policies of this type. This analysis suggests that importing international law paradigms into national security policymaking can be a pragmatic and effective alternative to formal international lawmaking, though it also may side-step the process of creating robust new international law rules. Therefore, it is a practice that executive branch officials from the United States and other countries, human rights organizations, and administrative, constitutional, and international law scholars should at least consider, while weighing both the pros and cons. In addition, the stickiness of such policymaking, even across administrations, illustrates the importance of institutional path dependence, the role of lawyers, the constraint of interoperability with key U.S. allies in multilateral military actions, and the way norms get embedded in government organizations
If You Don’t Have a Cow (or Chicken or Pig), You Can’t Call It Meat: Weaponizing the Dormant Commerce Clause to Strike Down Anti-Animal- Welfare Legislation
Get PDFIndustrial meat producers and proponents of plant-based diets are locked in legislative and litigation battles. On the legislative battlefront, meat producers are attempting to prohibit vegetarian and vegan food manufacturers from calling their products “meat,” “burgers,” “pork,” or other similar “meaty” descriptions. At the same time, animal-welfare advocates are urging states to pass laws to better the lives of animals in various ways, such as requiring meat producers to provide farm animals more space or other enhanced conditions. On the litigation side, both the meat producers and the plant-based companies are attempting to deploy the Dormant Commerce Clause (“DCC”) to strike down the laws inimical to their industries; but each side also ardently argues that the DCC permits the laws that benefit its industry. This Article describes the legislative battle and provides a theoretical framework for understanding how the litigation battle should be resolved under the DCC
Uncovering the Legislative Histories of the Early Mail Fraud Statutes: The Origin of Federal Auxiliary Crimes Jurisdiction
Get PDFThe federal crime of mail fraud is generally viewed as the original federal auxiliary jurisdiction crime, that is, a crime that does not protect direct federal interests against harm. Rather, it functions as an auxiliary to state crime enforcement. In the almost 150 years since Congress enacted the mail fraud statute, federal auxiliary crimes have proliferated and have become the most important part of federal criminal jurisdiction—so that, today, they largely duplicate state crimes. It is important to know how this form of federal criminal jurisdiction originated.
Mail fraud is a crime that scholars, judges, and lawyers have viewed as having almost no legislative histories linked to its original enactment in 1872 and its two revisions in 1889 and 1909. The details of its origins have remained generally unknown.
This paper breaks new ground by uncovering a rich set of legislative history details related to each of those three early statutes. Inter alia, these legislative history materials reveal that the original mail fraud provision might not have been drafted and enacted except for the fortuitous timing of the addition of a criminal penalty to a closely related statute. It also explains how mail fraud came to be the original federal auxiliary jurisdiction crime; that was not the original intention