Drawing insight from a diverse array of sources -- including moral philosophy, political theory, cognitive psychology, ecology, and science and technology studies -- Douglas Kysar offers a new theoretical basis for understanding environmental law and policy. He exposes a critical flaw in the dominant policy paradigm of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, which asks policymakers to, in essence, "regulate from nowhere." As Kysar shows, such an objectivist stance fails to adequately motivate ethical engagement with the most pressing and challenging aspects of environmental law and policy, which concern how we relate to future generations, foreign nations, and other forms of life. Indeed, world governments struggle to address climate change and other pressing environmental issues in large part because dominant methods of policy analysis obscure the central reasons for acting to ensure environmental sustainability. To compensate for these shortcomings, Kysar first offers a novel defense of the precautionary principle and other commonly misunderstood features of environmental law and policy. He then concludes by advocating a movement toward environmental constitutionalism in which the ability of life to flourish is always regarded as a luxury we "can" afford.

Using the examples of invasive species and transpacific air pollution, this essay outlines challenges to U.S. domestic environmental law and policy posed by global dimensions of sociolegal and biophysical systems. As will be seen, the deep interconnectivity of such systems suggests that significant determinants of environmental sustainability will always remain outside the predictive and protective capacities of U.S. regulators, even with respect to matters that conventionally have been regarded as primarily domestic environmental problems. This irreducible interdependency in turn suggests an underappreciated shortcoming of the risk-assessment/cost-benefit analysis paradigm that currently dominates the United States environmental policymaking discussion: By implying that the normativity of national environmental policy can be determined by empirical assessment of individual welfare consequences, such a paradigm fails to promote an ethos of national subjectivity, in which nation-states such as the United States recognize themselves as responsible actors on the global stage, standing in relations of moral and political obligation with other sovereigns, other generations, and other communities of life. Such an ethos, this essay concludes, is essential to successful environmental governance, whether or not nominally domestic in orientation.

"Regulation by public and private organizations can be hijacked by special interests or small groups of powerful firms, and nowhere is this easier than at the global level ... This is the first book to examine systematically how and why such hijacking or 'regulatory capture' happens, and how it can be averted."--P. [iv] of cover.

The book explores English marine protected areas regulation, linking the regulatory landscape to key theoretical themes in environmental social sciences.

DIVEven today, thirty years after the legal battles to save the endangered snail darter, the little fish that blocked completion of a TVA dam is still invoked as an icon of leftist extremism and governmental foolishness. In this eye-opening book, the lawyer who with his students fought and won the Supreme Court case—known officially as Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill—tells the hidden story behind one of the nation’s most significant environmental law battles. /divDIV The realities of the darter’s case, Plater asserts, have been consistently mischaracterized in politics and the media. This book offers a detailed account of the six-year crusade against a pork-barrel project that made no economic sense and was flawed from the start. In reality TVA’s project was designed for recreation and real estate development. And at the heart of the little group fighting the project in the courts and Congress were family farmers trying to save their homes and farms, most of which were to be resold in a corporate land development scheme. Plater’s gripping tale of citizens navigating the tangled corridors of national power stimulates important questions about our nation’s governance, and at last sets the snail darter’s record straight. /div

Experts from NYU Stern School of Business analyze new financial regulations and what they mean for the economy The NYU Stern School of Business is one of the top business schools in the world thanks to the leading academics, researchers, and provocative thinkers who call it home. In Regulating Wall Street: The New Architecture of Global Finance, an impressive group of the Stern school’s top authorities on finance combine their expertise in capital markets, risk management, banking, and derivatives to assess the strengths and weaknesses of new regulations in response to the recent global financial crisis. Summarizes key issues that regulatory reform should address Evaluates the key components of regulatory reform Provides analysis of how the reforms will affect financial firms and markets, as well as the real economy The U.S. Congress is on track to complete the most significant changes in financial regulation since the 1930s. Regulating Wall Street: The New Architecture of Global Finance discusses the impact these news laws will have on the U.S. and global financial architecture.

All of use heuristics - that is, we reach conclusions using shorthand cues without utilizing or analyzing all of the available information at hand. Here, Kelman takes a step back from the chaos of competing academic debates to consider the wealth of knowledge that a more expansive use of heuristics can open up.