savoy010

A strange message hit my email inbox today, advertising an upcoming event hosted by an Israeli law school and a leading Israeli environmental NGO to celebrate 25 years of Israeli environmental law . I'm more than a little puzzled by this as I'm not sure how exactly they came up with 1993 (or thereabouts) as the beginning of Israeli environmental law. Important environmental statutes, including the Regulation of Trades and Industries Ordinance, 1927; Oil in Navigable Waters Ordinance, 1936; Public Health Ordinance, 1940; Wild Animal Protection Law, 1955; Abatement of Nuisances Law, 1961; and the 1971 water pollution amendments to the Water Law (itself enacted in 1959) all predate 1993 by quite a bit. The Abatement of Environmental Nuisances Law, 1992 more or less fits the timing, but it happens to be a pretty unused (and useless) law. (I've written about a number of these statutes in a book chapter, "A Prolonged Recessional" ( Academia and SSRN ).) Old Knesset (par...

Over at Legal Planet Dan Farber recently blogged on "The Truth About Environmental Originalism" . Farber writes: Scott Pruitt has taken to talking about environmental originalism – going back to the original intent of our environmental laws. But he’s got the original intent completely backwards. The statutes weren’t intended to protect jobs or grow the economy. They were intended to protect the environment, with cost at best a secondary consideration. ***** In fact, some of the key provisions of our environmental laws preclude consideration of cost or even technological feasibility. For instance, the Clean Air Act requires EPA to set national air quality standards based entirely on possible risks to public health – and “with an adequate margin of safety.” As Justice Scalia himself was forced to admit in Whitman v. American Trucking Ass’n , the statute “unambiguously bars cost considerations.” In fact, he said in a footnote, EPA would be reversed in court there was proof tha...