The saga of Columbia Basin salmon recovery is one of the foremost natural resource restoration efforts in the United States over the last quarter-century. Although development of the world's largest integrated hydroelectric system crippled the Columbia's salmon runs, Congress declared in 1980...

This article applies public choice political theory to public lands decisionmaking and concludes that it explains why multiple-use management, the paradigm for most federal public lands, consistently overemphasizes commodity production at the expense of other values like watershed protection and...

The public trust doctrine was resurrected by Professor Joe Sax in a famous article a half-century ago. Sax explored the doctrine's history and maintained that it had contemporary significance at the time of the dawn of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Sax thought that the historic use...

This paper, a celebratory essay marking the 50th anniversary of the first issue of Environmental Law, the nation's oldest and most comprehensive law student-edited law review, discusses the background of the founding of the journal in 1970 and surveys the many symposia and leading articles it...

This article, expanding on an earlier essay, 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2985925' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2985925, explains the environmental and economic problems with a congressional bill that would have transferred federal Bureau of Land Management lands managed to the state of Oregon. The...

This edited speech, delivered at a land use conference shortly after the Supreme Court decided Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission in 1992, questioned several premises of the decision and criticized Justice Scalia's opinion for the Court. The essay suggested that the Court lost its way in...

Professor Blumm traces the evolution of the modern public trust doctrine in the West. He claims the doctrine is best understood by focusing on the remedies courts prescribe for trust violations. Although he sees four distinct categories of remedies in the case law, he asserts that they all...

In November 2016, just two days after the election of President Donald Trump, the federal district court in Oregon handed down Juliana v. Obama, a remarkable decision that refused to dismiss a lawsuit brought by youth plaintiffs who claimed that federal government's fossil fuel policies over the...

This article surveys the history of hydropower-salmon tradeoffs in the Columbia Basin in the 20th century. The resolution of those tradeoffs has overwhelmingly favored hydropower, as often the federal agencies running the Federal Columbia River Power System claimed a lack of authority to improve...