This paper provides one of the first detailed surveys of current oil and gas and hydraulic fracturing (also called fracing, fracking, or hydrofracking) regulation. It identifies and compares the environmental laws and regulations that apply to most stages of the oil or gas development process in...

The modern administrative state recognizes only a limited set of events as triggers of needed regulatory change. Legislatures often direct agencies to act, or administrators independently write rules, when dramatic catastrophes occur or new technologies emerge. This framework ignores a simple...

Recent domestic growth in oil and gas natural gas production from shales and sandstones called “tight” formations — largely enabled by a modified technology called slickwater hydraulic fracturing — has driven both economic growth and environmental concerns. Public concerns have often...

There is a long history of self-regulation—governance of firm behavior by private entities—both in the United States and globally, and there is an equally long discussion of self-regulation within the literature. But there has been less attention to the role of self-regulation in spurring...

The United States faces a critical moment in environmental regulation. As tens of thousands of new unconventional, hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells spring up around the United States, we face a long-term threat of significant soil and water contamination. The current patchwork of state...

In The Political Economy of Local Vetoes, 93 Texas Law Review 351 (2014), David Spence asks how we can regulate drilling and hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas in a manner that ultimately maximizes net benefits — assessing whether state or local veto authority over oil and gas development...

The early twenty-first century has witnessed a boom in oil and natural gas production that promises to turn the United States into a new form of petrostate. This boom raises various questions that scholars have begun to explore, including questions of risk governance, federalism, and export...

America has a long history of oil and gas extraction, but a relatively new extraction technique called slickwater hydraulic fracturing has captured the attention of the public, academics, agencies, and politicians. The newly-revived focus on domestic oil and gas — and particularly on...

The United States is in the midst of a boom in natural gas and oil production, much of which has occurred in shale formations around the country. As shale development has expanded — largely as a result of new horizontal drilling and “slickwater” hydraulic fracturing (fracking, fracing, or...

Renewable energy development has recently expanded in the United States, but the law has failed to keep pace with this expansion. Law perennially chases human needs, and in some respects, this is good. When law develops in response to change, it accounts for the real needs of those who work...