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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.

On June 30, the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government (FSGG) Subcommittee questioned Russell Vought, Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Given the influential role that Vought has played in the Trump administration, both as a member and in shaping its policy agenda through Project 2025, the hearing provided a critical opportunity for conducting oversight.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the U.S. Supreme Court recently held legislative limitations on the president’s power to fire administrators of independent agencies to be unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that because administrative power is “executive,” the Chief Executive must have the power to hire and fire the people appointed to head up all government agencies. Through this categorical approach to its “separation of powers” doctrine, the Court denied Congress a role in determining how best to implement the laws it passes, even though a) the Constitution is silent on whether Congress can impose restrictions on firing administrative officials, b) the legislature is a co-equal branch of government, and c) Congress is as or more accountable to the voters than the president.

With its June 29 decision in Trump v. Slaughter, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority takes another step toward building an imperial presidency on the ashes of the U.S. Constitution’s vision of a democratic republic. This clash over removal authority of independent agency heads was always meant as just the opening volley in this broader war. The end of the independent civil service, and even of administrative law itself, no longer seem improbable. The only real stopping point appears to be what the business community will tolerate, as today’s related decision in Trump v. Cook demonstrates.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now used widely in the federal government. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, use cases of AI in the federal government doubled — and for generative AI, increased nine-fold — from 2023 to 2024. With this growing use of AI, the risk of systematic errors with potentially harmful consequences may increase.

For the pro-democracy crowd, the arrival of June each year brings a palpable sense of dread. We are keenly aware that it marks the end of the U.S. Supreme Court’s annual term, when the most controversial decisions are handed down. And each year, we are left to anticipate how exactly our oligarchs in black robes […]

The growing use of AI for such complex governance functions as regulatory decision-making is attracting attention. The practice risks putting two existing bodies of public law—those governing the rulemaking process and procurement, respectively—on a collision course: in particular, rulemaking’s emphasis on transparency and procurement’s emphasis on quick commercial transactions that often do not include robust transparency audits. The impetus for this potential clash is that the architecture of many of the AI systems that the federal government employs are developed by private contractors.