{"id":3435,"date":"2009-01-24T12:15:42","date_gmt":"2009-01-24T17:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=3435"},"modified":"2009-01-26T18:25:52","modified_gmt":"2009-01-26T23:25:52","slug":"environmental-crime-and-real-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2009\/01\/environmental-crime-and-real-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"Environmental Crime and “Real” Crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I just got back from a couple days\u00a0at the University of\u00a0Utah, where I was participating in a national conference on environmental crimes at the S.J. Quinney\u00a0School of Law.\u00a0 It was a terrific conference, and I was honored to be included among the many distinguished speakers.\u00a0 But it was also among the more contentious academic conferences I have attended, with a marked divide\u00a0among speakers and audience members as to whether\u00a0the criminal liability provisions of the major federal environmental statutes have grown too expansive.\u00a0 The basic critique — roundly rejected by some in attendance —\u00a0was that the statutes (and the federal environmental sentencing guidelines) do not recognize important distinctions among environmental violations, but, rather, lump together offenses of greatly varying culpability.\u00a0 The debate thus centered on the question of whether environmental criminal law respects the principle of proportionality in punishment.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, it strikes me that the proportionality debate has a lot to do with how environmental criminal enforcement is framed: as an aspect of environmental law, or as an aspect of criminal law.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The speakers who seemed most satisfied with the current state of the law were teachers of environmental law and environmental prosecutors.\u00a0 From their perspective (to use\u00a0a metaphor one of the prosecutors\u00a0suggested), criminal enforcement is just the tip of the environmental enforcement pyramid, with civil and administrative enforcement used for a far greater percentage of environmental violations.\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0suspect it is hard for them to see a proportionality issue in criminal enforcement because they see the criminal cases in relation to the civil and administrative cases, and they recognize various ways in which the criminal cases can be ranked as more severe than the noncriminal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By contrast, those who teach criminal law (like me) were less comfortable with the status quo.\u00a0 We are less inclined to see the environmental criminal cases in relation to other environmental<\/em> cases than to other criminal<\/em> cases.\u00a0 In this context — when you are thinking about rapes, robberies, assaults, and\u00a0other “real” crime\u00a0— it is hard to see\u00a0the sense of\u00a0proportionality in imprisoning a person for recordkeeping violations, or dumping a load of sand onto a wetland on one’s own property, or misunderstanding the notoriously complex hazardous waste disposal regulations — particularly when no actual harm to the environment has been demonstrated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I continue to think that the statutes and the sentencing guidelines should be more discriminating — I’ll have a\u00a0paper focusing on the sentencing side of the equation\u00a0on SSRN later this semester —\u00a0but it is helpful for me now to have a better sense of where people with an opposing point of view are getting their sense of proportionality.<\/p>\n

Many thanks to the organizers of the conference for facilitating such a lively and illuminating\u00a0conversation!\u00a0 Look for papers from the Conference to appear in the next volume of the Utah Law Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just got back from a couple days\u00a0at the University of\u00a0Utah, where I was participating in a national conference on environmental crimes at the S.J. Quinney\u00a0School of Law.\u00a0 It was a terrific conference, and I was honored to be included among the many distinguished speakers.\u00a0 But it was also among the more contentious academic conferences […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,40,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-justice","category-environmental-law","category-legal-scholarship","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}