Breaking the Logjam in Environmental Law:

This Friday and Saturday, the New York University School of Law is hosting a symposium, "Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Law for the 21st Century." Co-sponsored with New York Law School and the NYU Environmental Law Journal, the symposium seeks to "diagnose the roots of current failures and present specific changes in US law" to address existing environmental challenges. Speakers were tasked with analyzing specific environmental issues and devising concrete reform proposals based upon four broad principles:

Cross-cutting regulatory approaches that address underlying causes. Since many environmental problems cut across the boundaries established by existing regulatory programs, existing statutes must be restructured to match the true character of environmental problems and their underlying causes.

Openness about trade-offs. New statutes must acknowledge that trade-offs are inevitable and ensure that they are made in public view based on reliable information.

Scaling regulatory authority to the problem. Statutes should empower states and trim the federal government's role to what it can effectively do. Correspondingly, the federal government should work with other countries and international organizations to address global problems.

Expanding the use of market incentives and information. The new statutes and regulatory programs need to harness the power of markets and information disclosure to increase environmental protection.

Organized by Richard Stewart and Katrina Wyman of NYU, and David Schoenbrod of NYLS, the symposium will feature remarks and presentations by a variety of environmental law specialists, including Richard Lazarus (Georgetown), Jonathan Cannon (Virginia), Andrew Morriss (Illinois), Cary Coglianese (UPenn), Daniel Esty (Yale), J.B. Ruhl (FSU), John Leshy (Hastings), among many others. The full schedule is here.

My own contribution to the symposium is a paper urging dramatic devolution of federal hazardous waste laws. A draft, which is still a work in progress, is available here. I will post more on my specific recommendations later in the week.