Environmental Law – Page 6 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

The Wisconsin Supreme Court Slows Down The “Quiet Revolution”

Post author:David Strifling
Post published:July 15, 2021
Post category:Environmental Law Public Water Law

About four years ago I wrote a blog post titled “The Quiet Revolution in Wisconsin Administrative Law.” My purpose then was to point out an “unprecedented makeover in longstanding principles of state-level administrative law” that “shift[ed] power away from agencies and toward courts, the legislature, and the governor.” Last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court finally took the field to address that trend, issuing two opinions in companion cases that effectively loosened one of the key new legislative constraints on agency authority. As a result, the pendulum has swung back toward increased agency discretion and clout. The opinions are also important because they continue a recent revival of the Wisconsin public trust doctrine, reversing a slide that I identified in a 2016 blog post.

The court granted review in the two cases (both captioned Clean Wisconsin v. Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (2021 WI 71 and 2021 WI 72)) to address one of the issues I focused on in the 2017 post: the scope of Wis. Stat. § 227.10(2m). That statute provides that no agency may implement any “standard,” “requirement,” or permit condition unless the condition has been “explicitly required or explicitly permitted’ by statute or by rule. The resulting opinions, joined by an unusual mix of justices in a four-vote majority, limit the statute’s influence and slow down the “quiet revolution.”

Environmental, Social, and Governance Programs Take Center Stage for Businesses

Post author:Nadelle E. Grossman
Post published:July 8, 2021
Post category:Corporate Law Environmental Law

In a recent blog posting on the Wisconsin State Bar Business Law Section blog, I wrote the following about Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) programs:

In connection with ExxonMobil’s annual meeting held on May 26, 2021, three dissident directors nominated by hedge fund Engine No. 1 were elected to ExxonMobil’s board, beating out the incumbents.

Engine No. 1 had proposed the director nominees (along with one other) to help lead ExxonMobil to long-term shareholder value creation, including through “net-zero emissions energy sources and clean energy infrastructure.”[1]

The fact that these dissident directors won the election over the incumbents indicates the increasingly broad shareholder support for clean energy to reduce climate change.

ExxonMobil is not alone in facing an investor challenge to its strategy in favor of a more carbon-neutral strategy. . . .

Collecting Posts on the Public Trust Doctrine in Its American Birthplace

Post author:Joseph D. Kearney
Post published:June 22, 2021
Post category:Environmental Law Legal History Public Water Law

Thank you to my colleague, Professor David A. Strifling, director of Marquette Law School’s Water Law and Policy Initiative, for his generous post a few weeks ago concerning Tom Merrill’s and my new book, Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago (Cornell University Press). The book ranges over almost two centuries and the different stories that led to the Chicago lakefront’s varied but largely integrated and altogether splendid whole. Given these temporal and geographic variations, “the core insight that shapes Kearney and Merrill’s Lakefront”—that “[t]he making of Chicago’s extraordinary landscape along Lake Michigan required law, lots and lots of law” (Professor Hendrik Hartog of Princeton University)—made intuitive sense to us from the beginning. Or at least it did to my coauthor, a noted scholar of property law.

Major areas along the Chicago lakefront (map by Chicago CartoGraphics): Figure 0.2 from Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago (Cornell, 2021)

Yet as our book’s title suggests, however much other law has been involved, the public trust doctrine has been at the forefront of lakefront controversies, at least since the Supreme Court of the United States used the Lake Front Case (more formally known as Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387 (1892)) to announce the American experiment with the doctrine. So Professor Merrill and I took a guest-blogging opportunity at the Volokh Conspiracy this past week to focus on the public trust doctrine. Here are links to our series of posts:

Lakefront and the Origins of the American Public Trust Doctrine (June 14, 2021)
Lakefront and the Confoundments of the Public Trust Doctrine (June 15, 2021)
Lakefront—Comparing Public Trust and Public Dedication (June 16, 2021)
Lakefront and the Public Trust Doctrine—Enter Professor Sax (June 17, 2021)
Lakefront and the Public Trust Doctrine Today: A Litigation Roulette Wheel (June 18, 2021)

You can find us a month or so from now guest-blogging at The Faculty Lounge, where we expect to consider the rules that govern—or might govern—who has standing to raise the different sorts of legal claims whose disposition has helped shape the Chicago lakefront. Each of these rules is in some way problematic, and differences among them have had notable effects on what a resident or tourist today finds on the lakefront—and what he or she does not. “[L]ots and lots of law,” it has been said.