faulker080

“Roast Yard no. 2” in Copper Cliff (c. 1903), providing a good idea of the damage the heap roasting inflicted on the local environment (City of Greater Sudbury Heritage Images, Copper Cliff Museum Collection, CC0115) Mark Kuhlberg and Scott Miller recently published "'Protection to the Sulphur-Smoke Tort-feasors': The Tragedy of Pollution in Sudbury, Ontario, the World’s Nickel Capital, 1884–1927" in the Canadian Historical Review . First, the abstract: While there are many tales of mining companies polluting the Canadian communities in which they have operated, Sudbury’s early history stands out. It is arguably the most extreme example of an industry dictating to government how the latter dealt with the local pollution problem–in this case, sulphur dioxide emissions. The capstone achievement was the creation of an extrajudicial solution to the problem that permanently suspended the legal rights of residents seeking redress for their grievances. Moreover, the Ontario...

One of the prices those of us who publish chapters in edited collections pay is that our writing often does not get the exposure it would were it published in a journal. So I'd like to bring special notice to a piece by Michael Lobban, "Tort Law, Regulation and River Pollution: The Rivers Pollution Prevention Act and its Implementation, 1876-1951", published in Tort Law and the Legislature: Common Law, Statute and the Dynamics of Legal Change , edited by TT Arvind and Jenny Steele (Hart, 2013). From the introduction: By 1850, the massive urbanisation and industrialisation which Britain experienced over the previous century had generated unprecedented problems of pollution. The mid-century laissez-faire state, with its small central government and fragmented local regulatory bodies, was largely unprepared for these problems, and environmental protection was left in the hands of private litigants - usually wealthy landowners - invoking the common law. However, reform at bot...

Eric Biber recently posted a series at Legal Planet based on his recent  Georgetown Law Journal  article, "Law in the Anthropocene Epoch"  (abstract below). The Anthropocene, for those who have somehow missed this buzzword , is (according to its proponents--it has yet to be officially adopted) a new epoch, in which the signs of human changes to the planet are visible in the geologic record. The article and blog posts contain a useful catalog of ways in which current legal doctrines and institutions do a poor job of dealing with environmental challenges, and essentially argue for the desirability of major changes in liberal conceptions of individual rights and private property. That sounds right, but I'd like to quibble over three historical elements of the argument. First, Biber's confidence in the direction of future political and legal change ("Humans will inevitably respond to the Anthropocene", "These responses will ineluctably lead to greater gove...

The law surrounding the health effects of tobacco are an important precedent for many environmental law issues (see here and here ). Now Martin Olszynski, Sharon Mascher, and Meinhard Doelle recently posted "From Smokes to Smokestacks: Lessons from Tobacco for the Future of Climate Change Liability" . The abstract: In this article, we imagine a future Canada (circa 2030) wherein the world has managed to avoid the worst climate change but nevertheless has begun to experience considerable warming. Governments of all levels, but especially provincial ones, are incurring unprecedented costs to mitigate the effects of climate change and to adapt to new and uncertain climatic regimes. We then consider how legislatures might respond to these challenges. In our view, the answer may lie in the unprecedented story of tobacco liability, and especially the promulgation in the late 1990s of provincial legislation specifically designed to enable provinces to recover the public healthcare c...