When I was a 7th grader living in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., my school system was one of many around the nation to launch a program of school busing to desegregate its schools. After 18 years, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education finally traveled a handful of miles down the road from the Supreme Court and arrived in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
The program was anything but voluntary as far as the school system was concerned, requiring a court order to make it happen. In fact, the order was very specific: It didn’t simply direct the county to desegregate; it required the county to submit for court approval specific plans laying out which children would go to which schools. It took the county, which fought the order right down to the last possible moment, several tries before the court finally signed off.
I was reminded of that as I listened to the latest episode of Connect the Dots, CPR’s podcast hosted by Rob Verchick, on the Juliana v. United States case. Verchick and his guests, CPR Member Scholars Melissa Powers and Karen Sokol, discuss in detail a recent ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, dismissing a climate crisis suit brought by a group of 21 young people. The youth plaintiffs made the novel but sympathetic argument that the government had failed in its constitutional obligation to actually do something about climate change and that it needed to act before we run out of time to make a difference.
The panel ruled against them, saying they lacked standing to sue. Unburdened by a law degree as I am, I was surprised when I read that because I’d understood “standing” to mean that the plaintiff in a case had to be able to cite some actual or imminent harm done to them by the defendant (in this case, the U.S. government, which stood accused of adopting policies that furthered climate change, causing a variety of damages). Surely those two criteria – harm and causation – were met. But as I came to learn in reading about the ruling, the additional factor that comes into play in standing decisions is redressability – whether it’s within the reach of the court to order a remedy that would actually fix the problem. The court concluded that a solution was beyond their reach and tossed the case.
That explanation was far from satisfying, either substantively or legally. But Powers, Sokol, and Verchick explain – and critique – the argument in a way that makes some sense. Most striking to my ears is Powers’ explanation, starting about 13 minutes into the podcast, of the court’s all-or-nothing reasoning that, since what was within the court’s reach to order might affect climate change but not stop it, it could not fix the problem, and that the plaintiffs therefore lacked standing to sue. As far as the majority was concerned, a solution was simply too complex, too involved, too legislative in nature for the court to take on, and so, as the dissenting judge in the 2-to-1 ruling observed, “My colleagues throw up their hands, concluding this case presents nothing fit for the Judiciary.”
And that’s where my mind turned to the Prince George’s busing case of 1973, in which a different court was willing not just to order that the county desegregate but to roll up its sleeves and dig into the nitty gritty of exactly how the county should do it. Why then, but not now, I wondered. As it turns out, that topic came up just a few minutes later in the podcast.
And right then was when the podcast lived up to its name. From school busing to climate litigation, dots connected. Give it a listen and see what you think.
Showing 2,818 results
Matthew Freeman | February 12, 2020
When I was a 7th grader living in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., my school system was one of many around the nation to launch a program of school busing to desegregate its schools. After 18 years, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education finally traveled a handful of miles down the road from the Supreme Court and arrived in Prince George’s County, Maryland. I was reminded of that as I listened to the latest episode of Connect the Dots, CPR’s podcast hosted by Rob Verchick, on the Juliana v. United States case
Katie Tracy | February 5, 2020
Last week, more than 100 advocates, academics, and reporters joined the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) for a webinar with three leading experts on climate migration and resilience. Presenters discussed the biggest challenges that communities and workers are facing due to the climate crisis.
James Goodwin | February 4, 2020
On Thursday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee's Environment Subcommittee will hold a hearing to examine the harm to children posed by the Trump administration's attack on one of the most wildly successful clean air protections in American history: the Obama-era Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS). The rule, adopted in 2012 after literally decades in the making, has reduced coal-fired power plant emissions of brain-damaging mercury by more than 81 percent, acid gases by more than 88 percent, and sulfur dioxide by more than 44 percent. Altogether, its pollution reductions have saved thousands of lives.
Karen Sokol | January 28, 2020
On January 17, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a much-awaited decision dismissing Juliana v. United States, a climate case that gained more traction in the courts than anyone had expected, given, as U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken stated in her opinion denying the motions to dismiss in the case, it was "no ordinary lawsuit."
Joel A. Mintz | January 27, 2020
From time to time, a judicial decision from a federal court has the potential to have a profound impact on American society and government policy. Such a case is Juliana v. United States, in which a group of 21 young people, together with an environmental organization and "a representative of future generations," brought suit against numerous federal agencies and officials seeking a judicially mandated plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and a drawdown of excess atmospheric carbon.
Dave Owen | January 23, 2020
On Thursday morning, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and EPA released a final rule determining which aquatic features are covered by the Clean Water Act. Already, the press coverage is following a familiar pattern: farming lobbyists praise the rule as a major victory, and environmentalists condemn it as an abdication of clean water protection and water quality science. The former part of that pattern has always been interesting to me. It's true that the farm lobby has been a prominent and effective participant in debates about this rule and its predecessors. But I think much of its participation, and the resulting press coverage, has been misleading. This new rule does offer benefits to farmers (at a likely cost to water quality), but the benefits aren't likely to be nearly as great as the rhetoric would lead you to believe. The goal of this post is to explain the changes the new rule actually makes for farmers and the reason those changes are more modest than you might expect.
James Goodwin | January 23, 2020
When the Trump administration released its recent proposal to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), it trumpeted the action as a long-overdue step to "modernize" the law's implementation by "simplifying" and "clarifying" its procedural and analytical requirements for federal agencies. If these words sound familiar, that's because they're the disingenuous claptrap that opponents of regulatory safeguards repeatedly trot out to camouflage their efforts to rig legislative and rulemaking processes in favor of corporate polluters. Put differently, those terms might as well be conservatives' code words to describe something that will cause more trips to the emergency room for urban children who suffer from asthma, more toxic contaminants in our drinking water, more irreversible degradation of fragile wetlands, and more runaway climate change.
Katie Tracy, Robert Verchick | January 22, 2020
It's no secret that President Trump has harassed staff at federal agencies since his first moment in office. Days after his inauguration, he blocked scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from talking to the press and the public. He famously cracked down on federal labor unions and chiseled early retirees of their expected pension benefits. Now he's requiring hundreds of staff from USDA's Economic Research Service and the Bureau of Land Management to leave their homes in the Washington area and move to offices out West or risk losing their jobs.
Alejandro Camacho, Robert L. Glicksman | January 21, 2020
The Trump administration has fired the latest salvo in its never-ending assault on environmental safeguards: a proposal from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to overhaul its regulations governing federal agency compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).