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The Colorado Supreme Court’s decisions last month holding that local governments in Colorado could not ban or place long-term moratoria on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) added to the growing list of states that have preempted local control over this oil and gas production method. This is a troublesome trend and one that calls for closer scrutiny […]

Tomorrow, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Superfund, Waste Management, and Regulatory Oversight is set to hold a hearing investigating the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) compliance with the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA). UMRA is striking because it was passed in 1995 as part of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s attacks on the […]

The political debate over regulation tends to focus on the regulations themselves. But enforcing the regulations is just as important. Despite what you might think from the howls of business groups and conservative commentators, the enforcement system is not nearly as strong as it should be. Twenty years after passage of the Clean Water Act, […]

We have an in-house guideline about bragging on CPRBlog, which is that we try to keep it to a minimum. It’s not so much a matter of modesty as it is that we think the work our Member Scholars and staff do speaks for itself. But we’re going to suspend our usual practice for a […]

During the last few years, airlines have increased their reliance on “bait-and-switch” scheduling. They induce travelers to choose their airline based on advertised routes and schedules. They know that especially good routes are valuable and generally charge more for a good route than a bad one. Long after travelers have taken the bait, often paying […]

CPR’s Rena Steinzor and Katherine Tracy had an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee over the weekend highlighting the reluctance of police and prosecutors to treat worker deaths as if they were anything but mere accidents. In fact, they’re often the result of illegal cost-cutting and safety shortcuts by employers, behavior that sometimes warrants criminal charges. They write: When a worker dies […]

Originally published on Environmental Law Prof Blog by CPR Member Scholar Dave Owen Today, the United States Supreme Court released its opinion in US Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes, Co. The key question in Hawkes was whether a Clean Water Act jurisdictional determination – that is, a determination about whether an area does or does […]

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan – the agency’s bold attempt to use the Clean Air Act to protect our health and the environment by regulating greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing power plants – has been challenged in court by some 28 states, 205 members of Congress, electric utilities, coal companies […]

This morning, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report finding that hazardous working conditions across the meat and poultry industry put workers at risk of on-the-job injuries and illnesses. While injury and illness rates reportedly declined in the decade from 2004 to 2013, GAO emphasizes that the decrease might not be because of […]