State and local governments have long maintained regulatory authority to manage natural resources, and most subnational governments have politically exercised that authority to some degree. Policy makers, however, have increasingly recognized that the dynamic attributes of natural resources make...

Scholars continue to debate the scope of Congress’s Commerce Clause authority and whether fluctuations in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Commerce Clause jurisprudence place federal environmental regulatory authority at risk. Yet when one analyzes major Commerce Clause cases involving resource...

Both international forest and climate negotiations have failed to produce a legally binding treaty that addresses forest management activities - either comprehensively or more narrowly through carbon capture - due, in part, to lack of US leadership. Though US cooperation is crucial for...

While much has been written about the U.S. Constitution, very little, if anything at all, has been said about the ways in which the Constitution shares attributes with the commons. This article examines the Constitution and the efforts to influence the shape and scope of its application through...

Peter Gerhart's "Property Law and Social Morality" provides a new lens through which to view the distribution of burdens and benefits of property ownership. Gerhart argues that property owners have a legally enforceable moral obligation to be other-regarding in their management of resources...

Natural capital resources crucial to combatting climate change are potentially subject to tragic overconsumption absent a requisite degree of vertical government regulation of resource appropriators and/or horizontal collective action among resource appropriators. In federal systems, these...

The constitutional structure of a federal system of government can undermine effective natural capital management across scales, from local to global. Federal constitutions that grant subnational governments virtually exclusive regulatory authority over certain types of natural capital...

Land development belongs with climate change in the category of "super-wicked" environmental problems - that is, problems of extreme complexity that seem almost impossible to solve. Yet, to date, land development has not been granted that status in law and policy literature. Rather, scholars...