In a blog post yesterday, Todd Aagaard provided a quick summary of yesterday’s Third Circuit decision rejecting the Farm Bureau Federation’s challenge to the Chesapeake Bay TMDL.  This is an interesting and important case, and it will take a while to digest.  But just based on a preliminary read, a few issues seem particularly interesting and important.

What does TMDL mean?  The Third Circuit interpreted section 303(d) in a way that seems to afford EPA—and the states—discretion in determining the content of TMDLs.  The Farm Bureau’s core argument was that a TMDL should only specify a daily mass of allowable pollutants, and that anything else—for example, a division of that mass into load and wasteload allocations, or into further subdivisions—exceeded the authority granted under the Clean Water Act.  The Third Circuit rejected that argument, instead concluding that “’total maximum …

The Supreme Court’s decision on June 26 recognizing same-sex couples’ fundamental right to marry is a significant, albeit long overdue, civil rights victory for the LGBT community and for our nation.  You don’t have to look any further than the long list of benefits available only to married couples to see how denying same-sex couples the right to marry or refusing to recognize their marriage performed in another state is discriminatory.  Fortunately, the Court’s ruling means same-sex spouses will now become eligible for these benefits no matter where they reside.

Given that many of these benefits relate to employment, this is a huge step forward for LGBT workers’ economic rights.  The significance of this is well stated in AFL-CIO’s amicus brief to the Court explaining the economic impact that the denial of employment benefits has on same-sex couples:

“State laws that deny the …

The following post is based on an article by Professor Glicksman on the George Washington Law Review website.1

In Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency,2 Justice Scalia, for a 5-4 majority, held that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s failure to consider cost at the initial stage of deciding whether to regulate emissions of hazardous air pollutants from electric generating units (EGUs or power plants) under § 112 of the Clean Air Act (CAA), even though it gave ample consideration to cost at multiple subsequent stages of the rulemaking, was unreasonable. The provision that EPA improperly interpreted is narrow in scope, applying only to EGUs. The decision remanding the case to the D.C. Circuit is unlikely to significantly affect EPA’s effort to regulate EGUs under § 112, unless the delay in the onset of regulation on remand stretches into a presidential administration that views this …

Today’s BP settlement is great news for the Gulf Coast economy, which still suffers mightily from the damage BP and its contractors caused. The President and his Department of Justice deserve credit for hammering out this deal, and keeping their focus on the victims of what the President rightly calls the "worst environmental disaster America has ever faced." 

If the settlement is to have the impact on the region that we all hope it will, we’ll need to be sure that the money is well spent, not siphoned off for political favors or otherwise misused. 

It’s important to remember that this money will flow to the region, and not simply into federal coffers, as a result of a hard-won battle to pass the RESTORE Act. That law is applicable only to this spill, so were another catastrophe of this sort to occur, God forbid …