Over the past quarter century, repeated congressional failures to enact any significant piece of environmental legislation led observers to describe such efforts as “gridlocked,” “deadlock[ed],” “dysfunction[al],” “broken,” the subject of “considerable, self-imposed inertia,” and the surrounding atmosphere as “highly inhospitable to the enactment of major environmental legislation.”[1] Things weren’t always this way, as I discuss in more detail below; in the 1970s, a remarkable burst of legislative activity largely shaped the field we know today as federal environmental law.

In a paper soon forthcoming in the Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law, I argue that a perhaps minor and certainly uncontroversial piece of environmental legislation known as the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 (“the Act”) reveals potential pathways through or around this modern gridlock. The Act prohibits the manufacture or introduction into interstate commerce of useful – but environmentally harmful – microscopic plastic particles known as “microbeads” that are commonly used in cosmetic products. Its provisions are direct and uncomplicated.

Yet the strategic building blocks underlying the Act—including an emphasis on public health issues and broad stakeholder support driven by industry concerns about unfair competition and opposition to local legislation—may provide innovative and useful foundations for future efforts to pass environmental legislation.

On September 7, 2016, amid great concern about the future of water quality and quantity, Marquette Law School will host a conference titled “Public Policy and American Drinking Water.”  The conference will take an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the legal, scientific, engineering, and environmental water issues that fill today’s news and touch all of our lives.  Leading figures from a variety of disciplines will discuss topics such as lead and aging infrastructure, privatization of water systems, public perceptions of water quality issues, the (under)valuation of water, and quantity and quality concerns related to groundwater.

Attendance is complimentary and open to the public, but pre-registration – available at this link – is required.

Participants include:

This week the City of Waukesha celebrates the success of an impressive technical effort 13 years in the making.  After inserting some final conditions, the Great Lakes Compact Council unanimously approved Waukesha’s application to divert water from Lake Michigan for its public supply.  The application has generated significant regional and national interest because of its status as a “test case” for the Great Lakes Compact.  The Compact generally bans diversions of Great Lakes water outside the Great Lakes basin, but offers limited exceptions for communities that straddle the basin line, or that lie within counties that straddle the basin line, provided a community’s application meets certain stringent technical conditions.  Waukesha is the first community wholly outside the Great Lakes basin to apply for a diversion (though not the first community to receive a diversion; New Berlin, which straddles the basin line, successfully achieved that distinction in 2009).  As I have written previously in this space, the Waukesha case has been a striking demonstration that the process set up under the Compact works, no matter what one’s position on the outcome.

Yet from a legal perspective, that process may not be complete.  The technical review and approval challenge remains subject to legal challenges.  One vehicle for such a challenge is the Compact itself.  It contains a “dispute resolution and enforcement” provision that offers redress to “any person aggrieved” by an action of the Compact Council or of a party to the Compact.  The provision offers a glimpse of a legal process that may be just as complex as the technical approval process just completed.