Webinar: Clean Water: Lessons Learned from the Supreme Court's Maui Decision

by Steph Tai,

Steph Tai

Steph Tai is a Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor Tai's scholarly research examines the interactions between environmental and health sciences and administrative law. These include the consideration of scientific expertise and environmental justice concerns by administrative and judicial systems, as well as the role of scientific dialogues in food systems regulation, and the ways in which private governance incorporates scientific research.

Professor Tai was an adjunct law professor at Georgetown from 2002-2005 and a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law during the 2005-06 academic year. Professor Tai’s teaching interests include administrative law, environmental law, food systems law, environmental justice, risk regulation, contracts (especially private governance and supply chains!), and comparative Asian environmental law.

Raised in the South by two chemists, Professor Tai decided to combine their chemistry background with a legal education to improve the use of science in environmental protection. At Georgetown, Professor Tai was the Editor-in-Chief of the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review and was a member of the Georgetown Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Team.

After graduating from Georgetown, Professor Tai worked as the editor-in-chief of the International Review for Environmental Strategies, a publication by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Japan. Professor Tai has also served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Ronald Lee Gilman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Professor Tai then worked as an appellate attorney in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, briefing and arguing cases involving a range of issues, from the protection of endangered cave species in Texas to the issuance of dredge and fill permits under the Clean Water Act. From 2013-2014, Professor Tai served as a U.S. Supreme Court Fellow as a researcher in the Federal Judicial Center.

Professor Tai actively represents amici in federal circuit court and Supreme Court cases. During the summer before joining the Wisconsin Law School faculty, Professor Tai teamed up with several other law professors to work on two Supreme Court amicus briefs: one for a group of legislators in Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp., No. 05-0848, and another for a group of scientists in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 05-1120. Professor Tai still continues this work, representing commercial fishers in Entergy Corp. v. Environmental Protection Agency, Nos. 07-588, 07-589, 07-597; organic farmers in Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, No. 09-475; former senior environmental agency officials in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center, Nos. 11-338, 11-347; and prominent climate scientists in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, D.C. Cir. Nos. 15-1363 et al.

Professor Tai's leisure time is spent lifting weights, boxing, reading fiction, listening to terrible pop punk, scouring farmers' markets, and annoying a rescue iguana named Megyn Kelly.

Steph Tai
University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School
975 Bascom Mall, Room 8104
Madison, WI 53706
608.890.1236
email
website

Amanda Cohen Leiter and

Amanda Cohen Leiter

Amanda Cohen Leiter is Professor of Law, the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs, and the Director of the Program on Environmental and Energy Law at American University Washington College of Law.

Professor Leiter teaches environmental law, administrative law, and torts, and her research interests include administrative law and process, and domestic environmental law and policy. From August 2015 to January 2017, Leiter served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals at the U.S. Department of the Interior, advancing Department priorities related to oil and gas and renewable energy development on public lands both on- and offshore. Before joining the Washington College of Law faculty in the fall of 2011, Professor Leiter was an associate professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law. Prior to that, she was a Beagle/HLS fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where she developed and pursued federal appeals court challenges to EPA rules governing industrial air pollution.

Professor Leiter clerked for Judge Nancy Gertner of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts; for Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; and for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. She is admitted to practice before the District of Columbia, the States of Colorado and Massachusetts, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Amanda Cohen Leiter
The American University Washington College of Law
4300 Nebraska Ave NW, Room 223
Washington, DC 20016
202.274.4187
email
website

Robert Verchick

Robert R.M. Verchick holds the Gauthier ~ St. Martin Eminent Scholar Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans, is the Faculty Director of the Center for Environmental Law at Loyola, and is a Senior Fellow in Disaster Resilience Leadership, Tulane University. He is the President of the Center for Progressive Reform.

Verchick is an expert in climate change law, disaster law, and environmental regulation. In 2009 and 2010, he served in the Obama administration as Deputy Associate Administrator for Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In that role he helped develop climate adaptation policy for the EPA and served on President Obama's Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. In the fall of 2012, he researched climate adaptation policies in India as a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, supported by a Fulbright Award.

His work has appeared in many venues, including the California Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the environmental law journals at Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. He is an author of three books, including the award-winning, Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard University Press 2010). Professor Verchick has taught as a visitor at several schools, including Peking University (China) and Aarhus University (Denmark), and has received several teaching awards. He has lectured across the United States, Europe, and Asia

Robert R.M. Verchick
Loyola University New Orleans
New Orleans, LA
504.861.5472
email
website
Twitter

In April 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hawaiian environmentalists who had waged a 12-year battle to ensure that sewage discharged into the Pacific Ocean via groundwater was subject to a Clean Water Act permit. CPR Member Scholars played important roles in convincing the Justices that we need a more scientifically relevant conception of the Clean Water Act’s coverage. On CPR's May 28, 2020 webinar, those scholars were joined by key litigants from the case.

CPR Board President Rob Verchick moderated the discussion, which touched on the history of the case, the legal and policy issues at stake, and what the decision might mean for the future of Clean Water Act regulation, permitting, and litigation. The legal experts also explored some of the underlying questions of statutory interpretation, agency deference, and more.

You can watch a recording of the webinar below, or on our YouTube channel.

Additional resources:

Read the Supreme Court's ruling in County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund.
Read Steph Tai, Karrigan Bork, and Thomas Harter's CPRBlog post, "Supreme Court Ruling Finds Old, New Middle Ground on Clean Water Act's Application to Groundwater."
View and download the slide deck.