• includes the new Supreme Court decision in American Electric Power v. Connecticut.
• is organized by subject matter, rather than their location in the U.S. Code, this supplement introduces the statutes with detailed outlines that highlight their most important provisions.
• includes legislative history timelines that trace the evolution of the statutes by explaining when they were enacted and when their most significant amendments were added.
• explains how to access the rich resources available on the internet for obtaining additional information about various aspects of environmental law and policy.
• also includes excerpts from judicial decisions in important environmental cases that have been decided during the past several years. This feature enables professors to supplement reading assignments from environmental law casebooks without requiring students to purchase a separate case supplement.

The revised Sixth Edition includes:

• Ten New Case Excerpts, including new decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on CERCLA, the Clean Air Act, NEPA, environmental standing and the Clean Water Act
• Four New Problem Exercises, including exercises on cap-and-trade versus a carbon tax, the application of NEPA to climate change, who should be prosecuted for criminal violations, and negotiation of a post-Kyoto regime to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
• "Midnight Regulations" by the Bush administration and the Obama administration's response
• New emphasis on Environmental Standing, including the Supreme Court's Massachusetts v. EPA and Summers v. Earth Island Institute decisions
• The new approach to CERCLA "arranger" liability and apportionment embodied in the Supreme Court's Burlington Northern decision
• EPA's new definition of "solid waste" and judicial decisions altering the agency's new source review program and programs for controlling interstate air pollution and hazardous air pollutants
• EPA's Clean Air Act "Endangerment" Finding for Emissions of GHGs, reversal of the California waiver denial, and California's controls on GHG emissions from mobile sources
• The relationship between the Clean Water Act's §404 and §402 permit programs , including the Supreme Court's June 22, 2009 Coeur Alaska decision
• Climate Change and NEPA, including the 9th Circuit's Center for Biological Diversity v. NHTSA decision on the environmental impact of national fuel economy standards
• Remedies for Claims of NEPA Violations, including the Supreme Court's Winter v. NRDC decision
• Climate change and the Endangered Species Act, including the impact of the polar bear listing on agency consultation under §7 and §9's prohibition of "takes"
• The latest scientific evidence concerning global warming and climate change, as well as material on the development of carbon trading markets, adaptation strategies, and carbon disclosure

The paper argues that while federal common law initially performed a zoning function by encouraging polluters to relocate to less populated areas, injunctions issued by the Court ultimately spawned the development of new pollution control technology. Through a series of injunctions designed to vindicate the right of sovereign states to prevent significant harm from transboundary pollution, the Court restricted emissions from Tennessee copper smelters, required Chicago to build its first sewage treatment facilities, and mandated that New York City construct an incinerator to dispose of garbage formerly dumped into waters washing onto New Jersey shores. By holding source states liable for damage caused by transboundary pollution, the Court contributed to the development of new technology for reducing pollution.

Despite its unique role in resolving disputes between states, the Supreme Court long doubted its competence to make complex judgments concerning appropriate levels of pollution control. Thus, it sought to encourage states to resolve transboundary pollution disputes through negotiation and cooperation. While these efforts largely failed, the Court ultimately removed itself from the role of arbiter of transboundary pollution disputes by holding that the Clean Water Act's comprehensive federal regulatory program to control water pollution preempted the federal common law of interstate nuisance.

In my previous work I have argued that globalization is affecting law and legal systems throughout the world in profound new ways. See Robert V. Percival, The Globalization of Environmental Law, 26 PACE ENVTL L. REV. 451 (2009); Tseming Yang & Robert V. Percival, The Emergence of Global Environmental Law, 36 ECOLOGY L.Q. 615 (2009). With the growth of global concern for the environment, nations are transplanting environmental law and policy innovations even from countries with very different legal and cultural traditions. Private actors and nongovernmental organizations are driving the development of new legal and nonlegal strategies to protect the environment. These developments are blurring lines that traditionally separated conceptions of domestic and international law and public and private law. This is leading to the emergence of what I have called “global environmental law.”

One of the areas in which the concept of global environmental law can enhance understanding of contemporary legal evolution is the long struggle to develop standards of liability for global environmental harm. The scant progress that has been made in developing tort remedies in international law demonstrates the limitations of relying on public international law that primarily governs relations between states when seeking to regulate private activities that cause environmental harm. For centuries, legal systems around the world have acknowledged the principle that those who cause significant, foreseeable harm to others should be held liable for the damage they cause victims of this harm. The sic utere principle of ancient Roman law and the “polluter pays” principle are now enshrined as universal elements of international environmental law, as recognized in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration and the 1992 Rio Declaration. While the nations of the world have pledged to develop liability standards to implement these principles, effective global liability rules have proven to be elusive. More than a dozen civil liability treaties governing transnational environmental harm have been negotiated but most remain “unadopted orphans in international environmental law.”

This paper reviews the historical development of liability standards for environmental harm and their haphazard incorporation into public international law. It discusses evolving national standards of liability and the obstacles that have made it difficult for victims of environmental harm to hold polluters liable under domestic law. It then examines initiatives to overcome these obstacles in certain countries by relaxing traditional causation requirements and shifting burdens of proof, as illustrated by the United States’s “Superfund” law, China’s new tort law and Japan’s motor vehicle air pollution litigation.

The paper also explores how climate change is spawning new litigation strategies that seek to hold polluters liable for global harm as well as the growth of private litigation to recover against multinational enterprises for the harm their actions cause in foreign countries. It concludes that as globalization continues to blur traditional distinctions between international and domestic law and between private and public law, liability standards for global harm are emerging more from “bottom up,” private initiatives than from the negotiation of multilateral treaties. As a result, as countries strengthen their own domestic liability standards to redress environmental harm, states’ receptiveness to entertain lawsuits by foreign plaintiffs and the development of reciprocity standards for the recognition of foreign judgments will become increasingly important. Transnational private litigation will help provide further impetus for the development of global liability norms that ultimately will become an important part of the new architecture of global environmental law.