Both critics and supporters of federal environmental law have called for its reform. Conservative scholars and policy makers in particular have called for reform due to the size, scope, and cost of the federal environmental bureaucracy. To date, however, conservatives have implemented few...

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...

Renewable bioenergy offers an alternative to fossil fuels for transportation and electric power, the two highest greenhouse gas-emitting sectors in the United States. Bioenergy feedstocks are cultivated crops , agricultural and forest residues, algae, sewage and livestock manures, and other...

Both liberals and conservatives have blind spots when pursuing their policy preferences. But in our nation’s hyper-partisan political environment those blind spots have become more pronounced, with serious consequences for our country and the globe (see, e.g., climate change policy). This...

This brief essay assesses the key role that environmental conservation plays in achieving stability in housing markets. The essay reiterates the many calls for a shift away from metrics of economic growth — like Gross Domestic Product and New Home Starts — that are currently fundamentally at...

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...

Isolated wetlands provide great ecological and economic value to the United States. While some states provide protection for isolated wetlands, a great many do not. These wetlands are also left outside the ambit of federal wetland regulatory protections under the Clean Water Act, with its murky...

Policy failures receive much attention from the public and from policy makers adjusting policy in response to failure. Yet, lessons learned from policy failures are necessarily ex post observations. Not only has the policy failed to achieve its purposes, but a great deal of political,...

Emissions from industrial, transportation, energy, residential, and commercial sectors are clearly significant sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Yet two additional sectors — agriculture and forestry — play a pivotal, dual role as both significant sources of GHGs and significant GHG sinks...

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...