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Recent polling shows that younger generations are increasingly distrustful of democracy. That lack of trust stems from real issues: The government can seem slow, corrupt, polarized, and unable to effectively respond to problems. Due to this, support for alternative forms of government can begin to grow. A strong leader promises quick solutions, fewer obstacles, and less chaos, while defenders of democracy seem to be losing the debate over governance. One primary driver of this distrust in democracy is the breakdown of ethical rhetoric. Modern speakers have lost touch with a productive use of rhetoric itself. When rhetoric loses this foundation, persuasion turns to manipulation, and democracy loses the basic conditions necessary for effective public debate.

In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court introduced a sea change to federal administrative law when it formally ended the Chevron deference doctrine in Loper Bright v. Raimondo. In its place, Loper Bright calls on judges to review agency interpretations of their statutory authority using de novo review. Two years later, we are still grappling with the full implications of this decision — not just for administrative law, but for our entire system of governance.

As part of its aggressive campaign to “deconstruct the administrative state” on behalf of the Trump administration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency controversially outsourced many crucial tasks to artificial intelligence (AI) programs like ChatGPT. In one episode, the program flagged funding for research on plastics industry lobbying and for digitizing audio reels by the Boston Symphony Orchestra while searching through National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants to eliminate those supposedly promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Despite such glaring errors, DOGE fully adopted ChatGPT’s recommendations to terminate over 1,400 grants. These errors illustrate two intrinsic problems with AI: hallucination (an AI system producing nonsensical or inaccurate outputs) and sycophancy (an AI system modifying its response to align with users’ views). With AI use likely to become more prevalent within the federal government, existing legal safeguards — including those supplied by administrative law — will need to be updated and adapted to account for these problems.

On the morning of December 30, 2021, the Marshall Fire ignited in Boulder County, Colorado. Driven by hurricane-force winds and fueled by vegetation desiccated by years of drought, it burned more than six thousand acres and destroyed over one thousand homes in a matter of hours — the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history. Boulder County’s lawsuit against Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil Corporation, filed in state court in 2018, seeks to recover those costs from the companies whose products allegedly caused them. The suit rests not merely on the claim that fossil fuel combustion drives climate change, but on the more specific and more serious allegation that the defendant companies spent decades concealing the relationship between their products and climate harm while actively marketing those products to a public kept deliberately uninformed of the consequences.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently cleared the way for President Donald Trump to keep building his garish ballroom, complete with gilded columns, gold chandeliers, and a “drone-proof” roof. The decision might look like a one-off fight over historic preservation, but some legal scholars fear the blast zone is much wider. The real question is more fundamental: who gets to ask a federal court to stop an allegedly unlawful project?

Teaching Environmental Law in Context is a fantastic resource, not only for law professors, but for professors of environmental studies and other adjacent fields. I can’t begin to tell you all the number of times that my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies (as well as colleagues in Environmental Science, Community and Environmental Sociology, and Geography) have asked for a primer like this with respect to environmental law. I am asking our library to get this book right now.

Teaching environmental law has always been hard. The problem is, it’s about things our students care about. It’s about what Exxon knew, and the BP oil spill, and birds soaked with oil, and little kids with asthma or lead poisoning or cancer because wealthy people in corporate boardrooms were indifferent to the suffering of Black and Brown communities. It’s about Native Americans marching in protest to protect sacred lands their ancestors have stewarded and protected for millennia. I suppose this varies by region, but here in north Philadelphia, students come into class energized, outraged, and ready to defend the powerless and speak truth to power.

On August 5, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided Committee for a Better Arvin v. EPA, which is both a significant air pollution case and an interesting case study in how the U.S. Supreme Court has changed judicial review of agency actions. The case was brought by a group in Arvin, California, a small city near Bakersfield.

In this post and video, I discuss the 4th of July Clearwater incident in New York Harbor with Dan Farber, a law professor at UC-Berkeley, who specializes in constitutional and environmental law.