The Breaking the Logjam Project
NYU Environmental Law Journal, Vol. 17, 2008
Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Reform for the New Congress and Administration Paper
17 Pages Posted: 26 Mar 2009
Abstract
This essay serves as an introduction to the Breaking the Logjam project, a joint undertaking of New York Law School and NYU School of Law to propose concrete and comprehensive reforms to federal environmental laws. It discusses the impetus for the project and the four guiding principles for environmental reform around which it was organized: (1) supplementing traditional hierarchical regulatory approaches with market and property-rights-like mechanisms, such as cap and trade and information disclosure, whenever these tools can reliably achieve environmental objectives; (2) realigning authority so that the federal government has responsibility for national and transnational environmental problems, and states and their subdivisions have responsibility for essentially local ones; (3) openly facing trade-offs in decision-making and ensuring that decisions are made on the basis of reliable information; and (4) approaching regulatory problems in a cross-cutting way that addresses underlying problems. The article then goes on to give brief synopses of Project articles published in the January 2009 issue of the NYU Environmental Law Journal, most of which were presented at the Breaking the Logjam Symposium held at NYU in March 2008.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation