When Public Safety and Water Quality Collide

Greater environmental protection and increased public safety are often believed to be synonymous, or at least to go hand-in-hand.  Sometimes, though, those goals are arguably in tension.  The application of salt to de-ice roads, parking lots, and sidewalks for safe travel is one such case.  Those who have lived and worked in northern climates are no doubt familiar with the sensation of excess de-icing salt crunching underfoot during the winter months, and have probably lamented the imStrifling blog photopact of excess salt on shoes, clothes, and vehicles.  Recent studies have shown that disproportionate application of deicing salt also has a significant and negative impact on water quality in the form of elevated chloride concentrations.

Not much attention has been paid to this problem from a legal or policy standpoint, and it’s unlikely that it can be addressed with traditional regulatory tools providing only limited authority over so-called “non-point sources,” such as farm fields and – as relevant to the problem of excess de-icing salt – roads and parking lots.  Alternative policy tools to address the issue might include a salt tax, green infrastructure, integrated watershed assessment and management, and self-governance at the community or individual levels incentivized by regulators or demanded by customers and the public. 

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Copenhagen Conundrum

We are only a week away from the beginning of the highly anticipated global climate summit in Copenhagen.  I recently took part in a mock negotiation session (I represented Mexico), and I can attest to just how difficult it will be to reach any agreement at the summit – even, as has been suggested lately, an agreement in principle without a formally binding treaty.  World leaders recognized as much at the recent Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting, and admitted that it was unrealistic to expect that a legally binding international treaty could be negotiated at Copenhagen.  From the basics of climate science to poverty abatement, the issues that divide the parties are vast.  Those issues have been discussed extensively, so I will instead point out three recent events that may affect the likelihood of a deal:

November 20, 2009: An electronic break-in at the University of East Anglia reveals documents and e-mails that appear to show intent to withhold or manipulate certain data; quickly dubbed “Climategate” by climate skeptics, the leaks are at best embarrassing for prominent climate scientists.

November 25, 2009: President Obama announces that the United States will commit to emissions cuts of 17 percent by 2020 and about 83 percent by 2050; Obama also announced that he will personally attend part of the summit.  The pledges are expected to break a logjam of countries that had been waiting for a United States commitment. 

November 29, 2009: India and China indicate that they may walk out of the negotiations if the developed countries do not agree to the sharing of “green” technology and massive economic transfers for a variety of climate change mitigation and abatement purposes, such as stopping deforestation and forest degradation.

No matter what your position is, the challenges are daunting and the stakes are high.  Whatever happens, the Copenhagen summit will be a fascinating opportunity to observe international diplomacy in the environmental context.

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Should We Abolish Copyright in Academic Journal Articles?

scholarSome years ago, when I was on the Marquette Law Review editorial board, my responsibilities included obtaining a rudimentary copyright release from authors whose articles we had agreed to publish.  In fact, I signed the form myself when I published my Note.  If we did not obtain the release, we would not publish the article.  I presume this is still the Review’s policy, although current members can confirm or deny it, and I also suspect that many journals have a similar procedure.  If the “open access” movement continues to gather steam, however, one can wonder how long this and similar practices will continue.    For example, Professor Steven Shavell recently posted a draft, pre-publication article for public comment arguing that we should abolish copyright for all academic writings.

The open access debate goes well beyond the world of academia, and what follows is only a brief summary.  Many open access advocates support both free online access to works as well as the granting of a license that permits copying and redistribution of the work.  They underscore the broad societal benefits that would flow from broad public access to such information.  Opponents of the movement have argued that true open access is impossible because publishers could not then recover the costs of their work, and that all but a few scholarly journals would cease to exist.  The usual response to this criticism is that the journals could simply charge the authors fees to cover their costs in publishing such works (and, in turn, that the fees would likely be paid by the authors’ university employers).  Perhaps this counterargument is less attractive given the current global economic downturn.

I think the fundamental question is the following: what motivates academic authors to write and publish journal articles? 

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