Scholarly work by Robert L. Glicksman, J. B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law, has been selected as one of the five best environmental law articles published in 2020, in a competition sponsored by Thomson Reuters.
The articles are identified by law professors who run the competition, including J.B. Ruhle of the Vanderbilt University law faculty. The top five articles, selected through a peer review process, are then republished in a special volume of the Land Use and Environment Law Review.
Reevaluating Environmental Citizen Suits in Theory and Practice, 91 U.Colo. L. Rev. 385 (2020), co-authored with David E. Adelman of the University of Texas School of Law, addresses the efficacy of “citizen suits.”
“Citizen suits are frequently cited as an essential legal innovation by virtue of their capacity to provide a backstop to lax or ideologically antagonistic administrations. Drawing on data from fifteen years of litigation under two prominent environmental statutes, we find little evidence that citizen suits effectively serve this role in practice,” the article states.
“Instead, we find that limited resources and institutional barriers strictly limit the number of citizen suits filed annually against the federal government under two of the most litigated environmental statutes, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA). While our findings do not negate the importance of citizen suits, they expose their limitations and the close alignment that exists between where suits are filed and local politics. Citizen suits mirror local values as they are overwhelmingly filed in jurisdictions in which concerns about the environment are the highest, and they are rare where public concern is lowest.”
Additionally, the article proposes three alternative models to citizen suits that range from “discrete, localized action to continuous lines of litigation over high-profile natural resources that can span decades.”
The acknowledgment through the Thomson Reuters competition is an indication that the authors’ peers in environmental law teaching and scholarship regard the article as a valuable contribution to the literature. Republication in the Land Use and Environment Law Review also exposes the research to a wider audience.
“My co-author, David Adelman, and I selected our topic because of the importance of the citizen suit mechanism to the enforcement of environmental laws and to correct misconceptions about the functions and effectiveness of citizen suits,” said Professor Glicksman.