Volume 46 (2019)

In 2018, the Fourth, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits addressed whether groundwater with a sufficient hydrological connection to navigable surface water should fall within the scope of the Clean Water Act. In two simultaneously released decisions, the Sixth Circuit held that the Clean Water Act does not apply to hydrologically connected ...

The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to engage in a public participation process when making decisions that affect the environment. The technical complexity of the NEPA public participation process blocks the public from participating in an agency’s decision-making process, and agencies often struggle to take public comments seriously ...

This past June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a Ninth Circuit decision interpreting the treaties of twenty-one tribes in western Washington to include a right to not have salmon habitat so depleted that it prevented significant salmon numbers from reaching the tribes’ accustomed fishing grounds. The basis of this ...

Native American tribes have an extensive history of resisting uranium extraction on and near their reservations. Over the years, tribes have employed a myriad of approaches to combat efforts to license new uranium extraction projects. These efforts include pursuing extraction bans, advancing human rights violation arguments, and intervening on project ...

In the last few years, coastal municipalities and communities throughout the United States have filed several near-identical state common law nuisance claims against major oil companies for contributing to climate change through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While the claims raise numerous interesting and difficult questions, one major issue is whether ...

Climate change, especially its symptom of sea level rise, will “unsettle expectations” and present unique challenges to takings jurisprudence. Historically, most takings issues focused on situations with clear instances of causation. For example, requiring a physical intrusion upon or forbidding development on private property clearly hinders a landowners’ ability to ...

Climate litigation is becoming increasingly common in courts around the country, as affected parties turn to the judicial branch following more than a decade of congressional silence. With litigants taking their actions to court, judges have been forced to grapple with climate science as well as the fundamental legal issues ...

Scholars have criticized the issuance of nationwide injunctions by district courts, arguing that they are an inappropriate and excessive use of power. Others have defended nationwide injunctions, asserting that they are necessary to ensure complete relief for plaintiffs.

Juliana v. United States is “no ordinary lawsuit.” Twenty-one Youth Plaintiffs from the United States have alleged that the federal government has knowingly abetted the fossil fuel industry in activities that have caused significant carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution for over fifty years. The continuation of policies and practices the government ...

The federal government owns 45.8 million acres of property in California, approximately 46 percent of the state’s total land area. Soon after President Trump took office in 2017, his administration began to threaten widespread rollbacks of protections on federal public lands. The State of California drafted California Senate Bill 50 ...

As the Editors-in-Chief of Ecology Law Quarterly and the Berkeley Journal of International Law, we welcome you to this special issue in honor of Professor David D. Caron ’83. This issue reflects a nearly year-long joint effort of law students in both journals coming together to publish scholarship that reflects ...

David Caron had an enormous impact on Berkeley Law School and on the field of international law. He is terribly missed. A wonderful conference was held on September 14 and 15, 2018, at Berkeley Law School to honor, remember, and celebrate David. Hundreds of people attended a moving memorial service ...

The title for our conference comes from a 2012 talk David Caron delivered at the American Society of International Law Conference when he was president of the society. Titled “Confronting Complexity, Valuing Elegance,” David urged that we approach complex legal problems with the aim of arriving at elegant solutions.

David and I were friends for over 30 years. On the professional side, I followed him as Chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration and he followed me as President of the American Society for International Law. We planned many symposia and programs together. One of the things we agreed ...

It has become a familiar trope to recite that we live in an era marked by an unprecedented growth in international courts and tribunals. Besides its empiricist overtones and familiar focus on the evolution of international law, this ritualized incantation serves to signal the increased importance of international lawyers. An ...

David D. Caron’s scholarship on the legitimacy of international law and international institutions was ground-breaking, expansive in its reach and its impact, and elegant in its analysis, form, and structure. The questions of legitimacy that he addressed in his writing represent some of the most urgent and important matters of ...

In his lectures and scholarly writings, David Caron was fond of conjuring images. Last September, he opened a lecture in Geneva by recalling an inscription over an entrance to this law school. In his American Journal of International Law article on the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, he described a rather ...

“ISDS,” as many of you may know, stands for “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” and refers to the current system of ad hoc arbitration that foreign investors and host States use to resolve their investment disputes. Because the system is ad hoc—in other words, the disputing parties pick the arbitrators and the ...

When it came to almost any emerging issue in international law, Professor Caron was at the forefront and, in many cases, had already written about it. We saw this with issues ranging from the minimum standard of treatment in Glamis Gold v. United States of America, in which he served ...

The theme of Berkeley Law’s September 2018 Symposium honoring the memory of Professor David Caron was “The Elegance of International Law.” This intriguing theme was taken from David’s opening address, entitled “Confronting Complexity, Valuing Elegance,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law in April 2012. His ...