Columbia Law Review

This Note argues that the allocations of power within the federal Constitution’s separation-of-powers framework hinder effective governance of environmental issues. The true problem is more than the sum of its parts: Several key failings of domestic environmental law result not from the shortcomings of any given statutory scheme but from the relationship between such statutory schemes, the boundary-defying and factually messy nature of environmental[...]

The conventional view of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel for indigent defendants is that its enforcement depends on the political branches to implement the right by appropriating the money to enforce it. But that’s not how enforcement of the modern version of the right started. For more than twenty-five years, between 1938, when Johnson v. Zerbst established a right to appointed counsel for federal defendants, and 1964, when Congress began[...]

This Piece is a call to eliminate the de facto requirement that a law review article conclude with a list of actionable and feasible prescriptions, often law or policy reforms, that respond to the questions or analysis at the heart of the article. Traditionally, this is Part IV of the law review article, in which a scholar is expected to explain how the preceding twenty thousand words can and should bear on how we move forward in the world. These[...]

The harmful effects of climate change have already arrived in cities and states across America, with disasters increasing markedly in recent years along with more gradual environmental changes like sea-level rise and drought. To protect populations and natural resources, significant funding will be necessary for preventative measures as well as disaster response.

At present, it is states and ordinary taxpayers who must shoulder the enormous[...]