Lake Michigan and the Chicago Megacity in the 21st Century

I have previously written in this space about the difficult water policy issues facing “megacities,” generally defined as cities with a population of over ten millA photo of the cover of Marquette Lawyerion people. Meanwhile, the Law School, working in partnership with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has taken an increasing role and interest in studying various aspects of the “Chicago Megacity,” the region stretching from the Milwaukee area, across metropolitan Chicago, and into northwest Indiana. For example, see here, here, here, and here for discussion of a variety of issues such as economic development, transportation, and education.

We are excited to announce that on April 17, the Law School and the Journal Sentinel will continue those efforts, hosting a conference titled “Lake Michigan and the Chicago Megacity in the 21st Century.” The event is free and open to the public, but advanced registration is required; find out more and register at this link. More details about the conference follow.

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Supreme Court Navigates Two Water Disputes, With More On The Way

On Monday the Supreme Court heard arguments in two interstate water allocation disputes, Florida v. Georgia and Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado. The Court has also accepted a third such case, Mississippi v. Tennessee, and assigned it to a special master. The cases will force the Court to examine the The Rio Grande River near the USA-Mexico borderbalance between economic development and environmental protection, the federal role in state water disputes, and whether groundwater and surface water allocation should be governed by the same decisional rules.

The trio of pending cases belies the Court’s expressed preference for such disputes to be resolved by interstate compacts entered into pursuant to the Compact Clause (Article I, Section 10, Clause 3). It has previously commented that it approaches interstate water disputes with caution given the “complicated and delicate questions” involved, and has advised “expert administration [via a compact] rather than judicial imposition of a hard and fast rule.”[1] Nevertheless, in these cases at least, an old adage often attributed to Mark Twain trumped the Court’s advice: “whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting over.”

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The quiet revolution in Wisconsin administrative law

The late Justice Antonin Scalia, a former administrative law professor, once began an address on Chevron deference by warning his audience to “lean back, clutch the sides of your chairs, and steel yourselves for a pretty dull lecture.”[1] Perhaps that warning should preface this blog post, which also concerns administrative law. Of course Scalia’s comments that day turned out to be anything but “dull.” Broadly speaking, neither is the subject matter A view of EPA headquarters in Washington, DChe covered: as the discipline concerned with governmental decision-making, administrative law issues confront nearly every legal practice in areas as diverse as taxation, environmental permitting and litigation, labor relations, and countless others.

In Wisconsin, the past five years have seen an unprecedented makeover in longstanding principles of state-level administrative law. These changes shift power away from agencies and toward courts, the legislature, and the governor. In this post, I divide the changes into three categories: 1) reductions in agency authority; 2) additions to the rulemaking process that, among other things, allow the Legislature to indefinitely block new rules; and, perhaps most importantly, 3) fundamental revisions to the doctrine of judicial deference to agency interpretations of law. Taken together, these developments deeply change the balance of power between agencies and the three branches of Wisconsin government.

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