The midterm elections are over, and most of the races have been decided. The outcome will have consequences for a wide variety of policies and legislation, including the 2018 Farm Bill. So what's the status of the bill? What are its prospects for passage during what remains of the 115th Congress? And how will the current and near-future political landscape impact the legislation's conservation provisions?

To answer these questions and more, I moderated a recent Center for Progressive Reform webinar with Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Caroline Kitchens of the R Street Institute, and Alix Murdoch of American Forests. While we all agreed that it's encouraging that the House and Senate conference committee is still working on the legislation, the discouraging news is that much remains to be resolved in the jam-packed lame-duck session.

Some of the major differences between the House and Senate …

This post is part of a series of essays from the Environmental Law Collaborative on the theme "Environmental Law. Disrupted." It was originally published on Environmental Law Prof Blog.

"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." If that's so, our climate and energy laws have been perfectly designed to fall short. They will not avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change or enable a swift transition to a zero-carbon energy system because they have not been designed to achieve those outcomes. Instead, climate and energy laws in the United States, including those promoted by the most progressive jurisdictions, are designed to gradually reduce some emissions and eventually phase out fossil fuels from some sectors, but they are not designed to achieve the drastic systemic changes in our energy sectors and human behavior that are necessary to quickly and permanently reduce greenhouse …

This post was co-authored with Shannon Roesler, a Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma City School of Law. Before joining the law school faculty, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Deanell Reece Tacha on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. She was also a staff attorney and teaching fellow in the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center and a visiting faculty member at the University of Kansas School of Law. Read her University bio. This post is part of a series of essays from the Environmental Law Collaborative on the theme "Environmental Law. Disrupted." It was originally published on Environmental Law Prof Blog.

Since the dawn of the environmental justice movement, we have heard the stories of individuals and communities left unprotected by our environmental laws and policies. Their stories reveal the …

This post is part of a series of essays from the Environmental Law Collaborative on the theme "Environmental Law. Disrupted." It was originally published on Environmental Law Prof Blog.

How much do presidents really matter to the United States' participation in international environmental law?

Fairly obviously, presidential turnovers in the United States are absolutely critical to how the United States conducts its international relations. President George W. Bush's pursuit of Middle Eastern terrorists in the wake of 9/11, including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, represents a far different engagement with the rest of the world regarding international terrorism than President Obama's reliance on drones and attempts to bring American troops back home. In turn, President Obama's engagement with the rest of the world on climate change, including committing the United States to the Paris Accord, represents a radically different path than the one President Trump …

Late last week, a federal district court in Montana blocked construction on the Keystone XL pipeline. The decision in Indigenous Environmental Network, et al. v. U.S. Department of State is a significant victory for the environment and a major blow to the ultimate completion of the controversial pipeline.

The case centered on the Trump administration’s 2017 decision to reverse the State Department’s initial rejection of the pipeline project, issued in 2015. The court noted that the environmental impact statement prepared by the Trump State Department in support of the reversal is deficient in its analysis of future oil prices and the need for the project, the cumulative impact of Keystone with the Alberta Clipper pipeline, the need to finish analysis of cultural impacts along the route, and the need for updated oil spill information. The court also concluded that the Trump administration failed to …

Originally published in The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.

By even cost-benefit analysis — the most biased metric — regulations are improving America, producing benefits that exceed costs by a ratio of as much as 12-to-1, according to the most recent figures from the Trump Administration. Of course, those numbers barely scratch the surface of what regulations actually "do."

Thanks in part to the Clean Air Act, for example, the median concentration of lead in the blood of children between one and five years old decreased 93 percent between 1976 and 2012. The Endangered Species Act was instrumental in bringing the iconic bald eagle back from the brink of extinction. And the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's regulations helped reduce worker fatality rates from 18 deaths per 100,000 workers in 1970 to four deaths per 100,000 workers in 2006.

Given the enormous success of regulations, you …

For two years, President Trump has attempted to steer federal policy in ways that undercut core American values. His vision of government – to the extent one can divine a coherent vision – lacks compassion, fairness, a commitment to equal voice and opportunity, and concern for the long-term threats that families and communities cannot address on their own. Instead, the president has embarked on a campaign to remake the core institutions of our democracy in a new, authoritarian mold. And along the way, he has set an expectation for his administration that its agenda and his personal political and financial aspirations carry more weight than the rule of law.

Tuesday's midterms showed that Americans are tired of Congress rubber-stamping the president's actions and letting his mean-spirited rhetoric become normalized. The newly minted Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will be sworn in in early January with a mandate …

The meeting logs for the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) – the small but powerful bureau that oversees federal rulemaking efforts on behalf of the president – have looked a little different in recent weeks. As usual, they are graced by high-priced corporate lobbyists and attorneys from white-shoe law firms, along with a smattering of activists from public interest organizations. But also signing in have been nearly a dozen ordinary Americans, representing only themselves, and they've been there to express their views on one rule: the Department of Education's proposal to weaken existing federal measures aimed at addressing sexual assaults on college campuses. 

The draft proposal, which has been a top of priority of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos the last few months, is attracting considerable controversy. It overturns several decades' worth of federal policy on the issue of sexual misconduct at federally funded educational institutions …

This post was originally published on SCOTUSblog. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US).

The Supreme Court heard oral argument yesterday morning in Virginia Uranium Inc. v. Warren, which concerns the largest uranium deposit in the United States, located in south-central Virginia. The petitioners are owners of the deposit who wish to mine uranium, and they are challenging a 1983 statute by which the Virginia General Assembly imposed a moratorium on uranium mining. Although all parties agree that uranium mining is a matter for state regulation, the owners contend that the moratorium was impermissibly intended to regulate radiation safety associated with uranium milling and tailings management — a field pre-empted by the Atomic Energy Act. The case therefore raises questions about the extent to which a state legislature's motives are relevant to deciding whether the state statute is pre-empted.

Arguing for …