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 article examines the reasons for the decline of Idaho's salmon runs, analyzes several ineffective past attempts at restoration, and evaluates a number of remaining options to prevent extinction of Idaho salmon. The article explains how and why, over a half-century, Idaho salmon have had...

Nineteenth century treaties promised Pacific Northwest Indian tribes the right of taking fish in common with the citizens... The meaning of those ten words has produced numerous court decsions in the ensuing century-and-a-half, including a half-dozen from the U.S. Supreme Court. This article...

The Columbia River Gorge, a spectacularly beautiful canyon along the border of Oregon and Washington, has for the past two decades, been the scene of a largely unnoticed experiment in land-use federalism. In 1986, to protect the Gorge from unwise development, Congress enacted the Columbia River...

This essay, written for a symposium commemorating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Charles Reich's famous article, quot;The New Propertyquot;, maintains that the 1964 article, which argued for procedural protection for government benefits like social security and unemployment...

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...