The reasonableness standard, Israel's current crisis, and Edward Coke

As protests continue to erupt in Israel over the government's proposal to oust the power of courts to review decisions of the government and its ministers for reasonableness, I thought it worth taking a look at the historical origins of this doctrine in an area of particular interest to this blog - water law.

Israeli administrative law's reasonableness standard was inherited from the British, who ruled Palestine from 1917 to 1948 and imported much English law and legal culture to the middle eastern jurisdiction. In the 1928 Supreme Court case of AG v Altshuler ([1920-1933] PLR 273), for instance, the court held that a municipal bylaw of Tel Aviv was invalid due to unreasonableness, relying on the English precedent of Kruse v Johnson ([1898] 2 QB 91).

Sir Edward Coke

As many will know, the reasonableness standard was apparently introduced to English law by the 1598 decision of the Court of Common Pleas in Rooke's Case (5 Co Rep 99b, 77 Eng Rep 209). At issue was the power given to the Commissioners of Sewers by statute (the 1531 Statute of Sewers) to assess lands adjoining water courses in order to fund the building of works to protect adjacent lands from flooding. The Commissioners assessed a certain Carter, who had seven acres of land flood-prone adjoining the Thames, with the costs of repairing the banks of the river along a long segment of the river, leaving a further 800 acres, possessed by others and similarly threatened by the waters, free of charge. In their defence, the Commissioners pointed to the language of the statute (s 3), which gave them the power to make repairs 'as Case shall require, after your Wisdoms and Discretions'. Edward Coke's report explained what he saw as the rationale behund the court's rejection of this claim:

Notwithstanding the words of the commission give authority to the commissioners to do according to their discretions, yet their proceedings ought to be limited and bound with the rule of reason and law [emphasis added - DS]. For discretion is a science or understanding to discern between falsity and truth, between wrong and right, between shadows and substance, between equity and colourable glosses and pretences, and not to do according to their wills and private affections ; for as one saith, talis discretio discretionem confundit [such discretion confuses discretion].

So administrative discretion, explained Coke, must be subject to 'the rule of reason and law'.

One might have legitimate criticisms of the way the reasonableness standard is currently applied in Israeli law, but it is clear that the current government's main motivation in its proposed legislation is simply the desire to be free of the rule of reason and law - which explains why there are hundreds of thousands of us out on the street protesting...

The environment in Dan Ernst's legal history exam

Dan Ernst (Georgetown Law) regularly posts a long exam question from his legal history course at Legal History Blog. This year's question was on federal grazing policy in the US. Some excerpts:

One of the Forest Service’s first projects was to subject stockmen used to roaming the mountains at will to the principles of forestry.  To develop and defend the new regulations, Pinchot hired, as chief legal officer of the Forest Service, an able and imaginative lawyer, who was personally indebted to him for, among other things, lending him money in the past.  The chief legal officer, who reported directly to Pinchot rather that the more politically connected Solicitor of USDA, soon worked out an ingenious constitutional justification for criminal enforcement of the grazing regulation, turning in part on the claim that the use of the public domain was not a private right but merely a privilege.  In 1908, Pinchot’s lawyer convinced the Department of Justice to bring a test case against a sheepherder named Pierre Grimaud.  A federal district judge ruled that the prosecution violated the nondelegation doctrine.  On direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices at first deadlocked, 4-4.  Pinchot was unfazed.  “I hold it to be the first duty of the public officer to obey the law,” he explained, “but I hold it to be his second duty, and a close second, to do everything the law will let him do for the public good.”  After Charles Evans Hughes and another justice joined the Court, Grimaud was reargued, and, in 1911, the Court upheld the prosecution.  The Forestry Service immediately brought scores of criminal prosecutions, and, by 1912, USDA could report that overgrazing in the forest reserves had ended.

*****

In 1934, the Colorado Cattleman’s Association sent [Farrington] Carpenter to Washington, DC, to lobby Congress to add beef cattle to the Agricultural Adjustment Act’s list of “basic agricultural commodities” and permit them to enter into marketing agreements controlling cattle prices.  Having succeeded, Carpenter stopped by his Congressman Taylor’s office to say his goodbyes, just as the grazing act was having a hearing.  Realizing that Carpenter would be an effective witness and learning that he did not think the public domain should be turned over to the states, Taylor asked him to testify.  (Carpenter was no fan of national power, but he believed that once the land was devolved to the states, different grazing interests would capture different state legislatures and produce an unworkable patchwork of regulation.)  Before the House committee, Carpenter spoke for small-scale cattle stockmen such as himself, plagued by nomadic sheep herds and pushed off public domain by larger cattle outfits.  Federal control was the small stockman’s only chance to avoid being “completely wiped out of existence,” he testified.

When, a few months later, [Secretary of the Interior] Ickes’s undersecretary offered Carpenter the directorship of the new Grazing Division created within the department to enforce the Taylor Grazing Act, Carpenter warned that sheep herders would object to his appointment because he was known as a champion of cattlemen in his corner of Colorado.  He claimed also to have said that he did not intend to create “a great centralized bureau” like the Forest Service, “run by Eastern people who know little about the public domain.”  After consulting a government official who once represented sheep herders, Ickes decided Carpenter would treat them fairly.  Whether Carpenter’s other warning registered with the Interior Secretary Ickes is not known. 

NEPA and executive power

During these days of executive/legislative tension in the US, the Journal of Policy History recently published John Hart's "The National Environmental Policy Act and the Battle for Control of Environmental Policy". The abstract:

In 1969, a public debate between President Nixon and Congress took place during the legislative passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and centered on two very different and competing conceptions of how presidential advice should be organized in the Executive Office of the President. It focused on the proposed establishment of the Council on Environmental Quality. The outcome of the ensuing battle represented a complete victory for congressional interests against the expressed wishes of the president. The nature of the debate has been overlooked in the literature on the presidency, but it highlights fundamental issues about agency design and presidential control of the institutional presidency. It also highlights broader concerns about the degree of congressional involvement in shaping the Executive Office of the President.

"New council on environment," Michigan Daily, January 30, 1970

Administrative procedure and environmental regulation

Legal History Blog recently published brief pieces by scholars visiting at Princeton's Davis Center this year, in which they wrote about their research. Some excerpts from Angela Creager's:

Why has environmental law, an area of widespread popular engagement and legal activity, met with such limited success in the last half century? Corporate money? Special interests? Neoliberalism? These usual villains are not innocent, but I am interested here in how companies and their lobbyists used provisions of law, namely the 1948 Administrative Procedures Act (APA), to thwart stronger regulation....

My focus has been the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976. This was the first US law aimed at providing environmental and health oversight of all commercial chemicals. The act was introduced in 1971 as part of the Nixon administration’s environmental initiatives, and different versions of the bill passed both houses by the fall of 1972, only to die in Senate-House Conference Committee during the 92nd session of Congress. In 1974, amidst the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, the Senate and House of Representatives again passed different versions of TSCA. Once again, the legislation died in committee. Early on, it appeared that none of the bills would not become law, a simple solution for its opponents.

In July 1975, a scandal reignited political pressure for chemicals regulation. Dozens of workers at chemical factory in Virginia were poisoned through their exposure to Kepone, a neurotoxic pesticide manufactured in the plant. The Ford administration made it clear that some version of TSCA needed to be signed into law to appease political pressure. Representatives for the Manufacturing Chemists Association (MCA), a trade group representing the chemical industry, began hammering out the details of a bill with Congressional staffers. The final statute specified numerous procedural hurdles for EPA in fulfilling its mandate to regulate chemicals. These hurdles were not conceptual slipups, but compromises made to produce a bill acceptable to industry. James T. O’Reilly, an industry lawyer who actually helped write the provisions, has said: “The 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) contains such obscure and inconsistent phrases that its supporters were doomed to frustration.” The legal scholar Kevin Gaynor, who analyzed the law shortly after it was enacted, called it “a regulatory morass.” Even its provisions “ensuring transparency of safety data” became “rigid procedural handcuffs.” This was a statute designed to make industry oversight difficult.

Many of these complexities had to do with how TSCA addressed requirements of the APA. For example, rather than make toxicity testing of commercial chemicals required for either old or new chemicals, the bill stipulated that EPA would have to issue a rule to require testing of any individual substance. Requiring rule-making on a chemical-by-chemical basis meant that the agency could only request testing data on a limited number of commercial chemicals, of the 60,000 on the market and thousands added each year. 

(from Environmental Working Group)

The water commons beyond property and sovereignty

Irrigation canal in Provence

Continuing the series of posts on "The Tragedy at 50" (the first one is here), here's the abstract of an article with a new, historical perspective on commons debates: Alice Ingold's "Commons and Environmental Regulation in History: The Water Commons Beyond Property and Sovereignty":

Do commons outline a different way of considering historical forms of environmental regulation? Might they represent a sort of alternative, apart from the usual model of environmental law which rests on public authorities and forms of restrictions of private rights? In order to grasp the complex relationship between environmental law and history, it is essential to pay attention to the state’s radical transformation in the nineteenth century, especially the separation (and separate definition) of administration and the judiciary. This article aims to historicize the commons, but also the state in order to escape the projected shadow of public administration in considering environmental regulation. It looks into the commons’ ambiguous relations with history. A first point is to critically reconsider the opposition between commons and enclosure, inherited from Hardin’s thesis. A second point consists in deconstructing mythical accounts of stateless commons. This is done by relying on water commons — which are also a key example in Ostrom’s theory. Early histories of water commons by commoners provided the opportunity for a first version of commons’ history without the state. This ‘discovery’ of the water commons presented them as a pertinent response to the aporia of the private property system, but also to the dangers of keeping resources available to the administrative state, which appeared ill-suited to managing scarce natural resources. This positive development translated into a series of fascinating inquiries, undertaken from the 1800s to the 1880s in several places across Europe. They gave rise to the very first ethnogeographic descriptions of the commons’ functioning. It was in the context of very acute conflicts over access to the resource that this use of history became enshrined. The historical longevity of these irrigators’ communities was highlighted in order to defend their historical and customary rights against the administrative state’s will to regulate all water courses, which was more favorable to new users in water sharing. The resource’s ecological limit thus served to set boundaries to the administration’s intervention. Scarcity was a way to conceive of the resource as unavailable both for property and for state sovereignty. Protecting environmental resources through the courts was a way of conceiving a regulation based on the resource’s specific status, rather than on the will of subjects — whether private, collective or public. 

Historical analysis in environmental law III: Winds of change

In the previous post in this series I discussed the seeming lack of interest of legal historians in environmental angles. Nonetheless, recent years have seen deepening interest in the history of environmental law, with a few scholars highlighting the connections between the supposedly foundational environmental legislation of the 1970s and earlier law. One prominent work in this genre of pushing back environmental law's start date is Karl Boyd Brooks's Before Earth Day. Brooks's book is notable not only for identifying the statutory precursors of modern environmental regulation, but for its attempt to trace the manifold legal, personal, and institutional connections between legislation and litigation, and between pollution control law and the law of nature protection, two areas of modern environmental law that might be assumed to have distinct, even antagonistic, origins.

Another front opened recently regards the relationship between modern environmental law as it coalesced in the 1970s and the New Deal administrative state. On the one hand, Arthur McEvoy has argued that environmental law was a project of the New Deal regime, and that after the early 1970s it declined along with the wider regime. On the other, two recent articles have argued that the environmental law of the 1970s marked a break with New Deal liberalism. Paul Sabin explains the era's public interest law organizations as growing out of environmentalists' increasing disillusionment with the state as an engine of public-minded environmental protection, spurring a turn to an oppositional and litigious stance. Jedidiah Purdy, meanwhile, sees the salient federal legislation of the 1970s and the organizations that grew up around it as departing from an earlier tradition that viewed environmental issues in a wider context of social and economic justice. Mainstream environmental lawyers, he argues, were lulled by the shrinking economic inequality of the postwar period into focusing on elite and professional advocacy and environmental issues narrowly defined, forsaking issues, such as the disproportionate impacts of environmental harms (and environmental regulation) on minorities and workers, that would later come to be labelled 'environmental justice'.

Yet while these works do the valuable service of suggesting connections to wider themes of legal history such as the rise of—and reaction to—the administrative state, they push back the start of environmental law by only a few decades. They also make no connections to environmental regulation before the twentieth century, outside the US, or indeed outside the arena of federal regulation.

It bears noting that the relative dearth of historical work on environmental law, as well as the relatively narrow jurisdictional and chronological frames of what work there is, are far more marked in the American context than in the European. For instance, scholars have produced a significant body of work on French regulation of early industrial pollution, and quite a few British legal historians have given significant attention to environmental issues. Noga Morag-Levine's work has bridged some of these bodies of scholarship, compellingly arguing that English and Continental approaches to pollution control in the nineteenth century continue to inform current American debates over issues such as the appropriateness of the precautionary principle or feasibility standards. The blindness as to the history of environmental law may be a particularly American disease. (To the extent it is, this exceptionalism is itself a topic worthy of research).

The work that perhaps treats American environmental law in the most comprehensive manner is Betsy Mendelsohn's chapter on law and the environment in The Cambridge History of Law in America, which notes in its opening section:

Historical analysis in environmental law II: "The one came not near the other all the night"

Edvard Munch, Separation (1896)

(Continuing the series on historical analysis in environmental law. Links to the full series and the article are here.)

In May 2010 Environmental History, the leading journal in its field, published an article by Aaron Sachs on antebellum environmental thought as expressed in contemporary American cemeteries. A few months later legal historian Alfred Brophy published a blog post on American antebellum constitutionalism as expressed in speeches made in cemeteries. Though both pieces focused on the same cemeteries, with rich discussions of the political, social, and cultural contexts in which they operated, neither work made any reference to the other, nor, indeed, to the literature or historical sub-discipline in which the other was located. Three years later, both pieces were released in expanded form, again with no interaction between them or their scholarly worlds.

This was not an isolated (non-)incident. Though the fields of environmental history and legal history seemingly share a wealth of common interests—the histories of capitalism, slavery, and the administrative state are a few of the topics receiving intense attention in both fields in recent years—the two fields move through parallel intellectual universes with nary a glance at one another.

If there is a certain symmetry in the blissful ignorance in which each field operates with regard to the scholarship of its sister field, the same cannot be said of the relative interest each takes in the subject matter of the other. In the last decade (2007-2016) Law and History Review, the leading English-language legal history journal, published only three articles that might be described as engaging with environmental issues; and only one of these—its author an environmental historian, not a legal one—was directly on an environmental topic. Meanwhile the situation in Environmental History, the leading journal in its field, in the same period was radically different; counting conservatively, over twenty-five articles in this journal engaged significantly with legal issues, on a wide variety of topics, including a collection of essays dedicated to a single environmental statute. A similar picture emerges from an examination of leading European journals in the two fields: On the one hand, Journal of Legal History with two articles dealing with issues of public property that might be tagged as environmental and Rechtsgechichte with three on environmental topics; on the other, Environment and History with close to thirty articles with significant treatment of legal issues.

Environmental timelines

A while back Environmental History carried a review by Daniel Simberloff of Ian Rotherham's Eco-history: An Introduction to Biodiversity and Conservation (White Horse Press, 2014). Simberloff notes:

The high point of Eco-history is a remarkable 42-page “Timeline,” detailing in linear fashion 224 key points in the history of British nature conservation from AD 1000 to 2000: laws especially, but also extinctions, introductions, establishment of nature reserves and environmental organizations. Rotherham concisely lists the impacts of each event, with further explication for about half of them. This section alone could be published as a short book that almost any environmental historian would value.

I don't think they're related, but there's also a very elaborate website called "Environmental history timeline", itself packed with little known nuggets of environmental-legal history, such as the fact that in 1970 US President Richard Nixon "issued an executive order... requiring industries to obtain a federal permit before dumping wastes into U.S. waterways or face criminal charges. This was the beginning of the US National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permitting process." Or that in 1779

Johann Peter Frank (1745-1821), writes A Complete System of Medical Policy in Germany advocating governmental responsibility for clean water, sewage systems, garbage disposal, food inspection and other health measures under an authoritative “medical police.” This idea was well received and influenced policy in Germany, Italy and other nearby nations. The authoritarian approach did not sit well with the French, British or Americans, where direct government controls developed only in areas of specific problems such as communicable disease and sanitation.

There's a lot more in this timeline, worth perusing and bookmarking.

Gorsuch and Hamburger

A few months ago we noted some of the environmental dimensions of Philip Hamburger's revisionist account of the history of administrative law. Now Eric Posner points out some contemporary relevance of Hamburger's controversial views (thanks to Legal History Blog for flagging the post, and to Eric for approving the re-post):

Judge Gorsuch has approvingly cited Philip Hamburger’s book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, in three opinions.* That is three times the number of opinions citing Hamburger’s book written by all the judges in all the federal circuit courts put together. Is this a matter of significance?

Hamburger argues that “administrative power” is unconstitutional. This is a radical view. I mean a radical view in the sense that, if taken seriously, it would require the invalidation of much of the administrative state. Agencies like EPA and the Fed could continue to exist, but only to gather facts, monitor industry, and bring claims against people and companies based on statutes enacted by Congress. They would not be allowed to issue regulations, that is, rules. Only Congress could do that.

I do not think that this vision is acceptable to the public, or really anyone, not even business, which says that it opposes regulation but in fact depends on it more often than not. But his view is an appealing fantasy, and it has excited the conservative legal community. It’s much easier to say “it’s all unconstitutional” than to explain why this regulation or that one is unwise or illegal.

In rereading Hamburger, I am struck by three themes, which resonate with our political times.

The Trump environmental transition

After a pleasant interlude in medieval English forests, we return to recent history with a recent post by Craig Oren on RegBlog. After laying out some of the possible deregulatory moves we will see from the Trump administration, Oren takes us back in time:

We must remember 1981, when the Reagan Administration came into power. Its choice for EPA administrator was Anne Gorsuch [Neil Gorsuch's mother-DS], who had little experience in environmental matters. Lobbyists seeking deregulation initially had much influence on the agency. During her short-lived tenure, a draft emerged of proposed amendments that would have eviscerated the Clean Air Act, much to the horror of environmental groups. Gorsuch also repeatedly weakened EPA’s enforcement office. Gorsuch warred with the agency’s career staff: a number of high-level executives were transferred—and some lost their jobs altogether—as punishment for not being sufficiently compliant with the Administration’s priorities.

Gorsuch at her farewell news conference

Capitol Hill looked unpromising, too, during the Reagan years. Then-Representative John Dingell (D-Mich.)—a firm environmentalist, but also someone who was concerned with the interests of auto companies, which employed many of the constituents in his Detroit congressional district—joined with industry and Republicans to put together a package of weakening amendments to the Clean Air Act, including a rollback of auto-emission standards l. And a so-called regulatory reform bill, designed to hamstring agencies from protecting public health and the environment, seemed in 1982 to have a considerable chance for some time of being enacted.

Ecology and procedure in the history of ecosystem management

A while ago we noted a review of James Skillen's book on the US Bureau of Land Management. Now American Historical Review has a review by Leisl Carr Childers of Skillen's latest book, Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife (University Press of Kansas, 2015). Childers writes:

Divided into two parts and featuring three case studies, Federal Ecosystem Management examines the historical contexts of ecological science and public administration from which ecosystem management emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and analyzes its implementation during the George H. W. Bush and William J. Clinton presidential administrations. According to Skillen, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1969) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA, 1973) formed the cornerstones of ecosystem management. These legislative mandates did not systematize ecosystem management; rather, they allowed federal land management agencies to implement two competing versions of the paradigm. Ecosystem management, undergirded by the ESA, focused on achieving substantive goals that married ecosystem protection with resource development and provided a dynamic process through which land managers could respond to the constantly shifting complex of ecological systems by continually adapting their management plans to reach a specific goal. In contrast, ecosystem management relied on NEPA and concentrated on achieving procedural goals by using scientific assessment and open, democratic deliberation. In this version, gathering scientific information and using public input to shape management decisions continued to ensure sustained yield in natural resource development.

Yet without a clear legislative mandate to guide the process, the application of both versions of ecosystem management was as varied as the missions and cultures of the land management agencies that employed them. In case studies on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where the Forest Service and National Park Service first attempted collaborative projects that utilized the paradigm, and the Northwest Forest Plan and the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, which emphasized the substantive and procedural versions of the paradigm respectively, Skillen deftly demonstrates the political difficulties surrounding the actual implementation of ecosystem management. In no context was either version of the paradigm truly operational, and the tension between the two variations has perpetrated increasing political polarization. Nevertheless, Skillen leaves readers with the sense that despite its failure, the basic tenants of ecosystem management remain.

Administrative expertise in the UK

The latest Journal of Environmental Law has a review essay by Elizabeth Fisher, "The Enigma of Expertise", reviewing Knowledge, Policy and Expertise: The UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution 1970–2011, by Susan Owens (OUP, 2015). Some of the historical background in the article (with footnotes omitted and links added):

Within UK administrative law and public administration there has always been scepticism of attempts at bureaucratic rationalisation. Public administration in most jurisdictions grew in a haphazard fashion but in the UK particularly so. The reasons for this are many and overlapping. The lack of a vigorous doctrine of separation of powers and thus a fused constitutional and administrative law is one factor. The failed ‘Prussian bureaucratic’ experiments of Edwin Chadwick in the 19th century another. As is the ideal of the generalist civil service as promoted by the Northcote Trevelyan Report in 1870. Administrative law took far longer in the UK to be recognised and when it did the American administrative lawyer, Kenneth Culp Davis accused British judges of being too much like ‘bricklayers’ and not enough like ‘architects’. He also noted that ‘the essence of the administrative process is missing from the literature of English administrative law’. It is also useful to remember that Lord Diplock’s articulation of the three grounds of judicial review was an act of codification not rationalisation. As Kamenka has put it, the common law also has traditionally had an ‘anti-administrative character’....

Throughout the 19th century, there was a ‘piecemeal accumulation of expertise’ in British government. By the 1920s, the need for expert public administration was becoming obvious. A major catalyst for this need was World War I as it made clear the nexus between knowledge and power. Recognising that nexus did not however result in a rose tinted understanding of expertise. ‘The expert is a notoriously bad judge’ ECS Wade wrote in 1930 (judges on the contrary were of course good at judging). Lord Hewart in 1930 wrote that expert officials were ‘naturally and necessarily hidden and anonymous’ so that they could not be examined or ‘brought to book’. Zimmern noted that ‘the solution worked out by Expert Committees are not edicts imposed by an omniscient dictatorship’.

Environmental history in oral arguments

Brian Tomasovic recently posted the abstract for his article "Soundscape History and Environmental Law in the Supreme Court", published last year in Environmental Law. The abstract:

Today’s technology unleashes new, digitized information resources with immense scale and speed. This Article examines one such resource — the archive of audio recorded proceedings of the United States Supreme Court — appraising, for the first time, its value to those who study and practice environmental law. From hundreds of hours of audio across six decades, a history of environmental litigation sounds forth, imparting rich lessons on advocacy, judicial reasoning, and the role of the Court in environmental law’s development. The Article organizes itself in three major parts, furnishing insights on: oral advocacy in the environmental docket; the voices from the bench; and the audience for prospective engagement with any selection or subset of recordings. Serving partly as a listener’s guide, the Article defines the reach of environmental litigation in the audio archive and demonstrates its unique value as a tool for learning and the professional betterment of environmental law scholars and practitioners.

Tomasovic explains that argument audio hosted on the Supreme Court’s website presently begins with the October 2010 Term, while recordings going back to 1955 are at the Oyez website. The article's Appendix B "compiles the list of available oral argument recordings for more than three hundred Supreme Court cases where environmental protection or natural resource concerns were at stake", and also "labels, using keyword tags, the identity of these settings under the rubric of the environmental burdens, risks, or amenities at issue in each case".

Is this resource important? Tomasovic thinks so; here are some highlights from my perspective (footnotes omitted). I'll start with his treatment of environmental history as reflected in the recordings:

Commissioners of Sewers and early modern English administrative law

sign in Redwick, Monmouthshire (courtesy geograph)

A couple of years ago we noted the publication of Philip Hamburger's controversial Is Administrative Law Unlawful?. Paul Craig recently posted a paper refuting much of Hamburger's historical argument about the supposed lack of administrative law in early modern England, "The Legitimacy of US Administrative Law and the Foundations of English Administrative Law: Setting the Historical Record Straight". One section deals with the Commissioners of Sewers, and as it's relatively short, I'll reproduce it here (leaving out some of the footnotes):

Sidney and Beatrice Webb began their account of the Commissioners of Sewers [p 13] by noting the difficulty faced by the twentieth century observer in appreciating just how much of England had been composed of vast fens and marshes. Therein lies the explanation for the early attention given to drainage and defences against the sea, leading to the Statute of Sewers 1531, which gave statutory foundation for the Commissioners of Sewers and the Courts of Sewers. They resembled in many respects justices of the peace for the counties, albeit with a specialized jurisdiction over rivers, sewers, ditches, bridges, locks, weirs, sea defences and the like. Their jurisdiction was akin to that of a modern environmental agency. This analogy can be pressed further, insofar as the Commissioners of Sewers “combined in themselves, judicial, executive and even legislative powers” [Webbs, 21]. It is with the rulemaking powers that we are presently concerned.

The Statute of Sewers 1531 authorized Commissioners of Sewers to undertake flood defences broadly conceived, and gave them extensive powers to fulfil this remit. They could make individual decisions concerning repairs that were needed to river banks, sea walls, streams, ditches, gutters and the like, and apportion the costs. They were also authorized to make rules. The Commissioners could use the laws and customs of Romney Marsh as a boilerplate, or devise provisions according to their own discretion. They could thus, "[M]ake and ordain Statutes, Ordinances, and Provisions from time to time, as the Case shall require, for the Safeguard, Conservation, Redress, Correction, and Reformation of the Premisses, and of every of them, and the Parts lying to the same, necessary and behoful, after the Laws and Customs of Rumney Marsh in the County of Kent, or otherwise by any Ways or Means after your own Wisdoms and Discretions."

This rule-making capacity was extensive. The 1531 Statute stipulated that the Commissioners’ rules remained effective for the tenure of their office, which at that time was three years, but were ineffective thereafter. This temporal limit was, however, subject to an exception, whereby the rules could retain their binding force if they were “made and ingrossed in Parchment, and certified under the Seals of the said Commissioners into the King's Court of Chancery, and then the King's Royal Assent be had to the same.”

Preserving Austrian Forests—and More

“Sustainability is the key principle”—that’s how Bernhard Mittermüller describes the great Austrian Forest Act of 1975 in my latest video, “Preservation Waltz.” Mittermüller teaches at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, fondly known as BOKU, and he was kind enough to speak with me for this latest addition to my series about Austrian conceptions of law and the Austrian experience of landscape (discussed previously on ELH here and here).

One of the things that intrigued me during my Fulbright stay in Austria was the way that many of its modern, progressive legal concepts grew out its monarchical past, and they bear traces of that royal origin. In Austria, the echo of monarchy is everywhere, including in jurisprudence.

That’s certainly true of the legal concept of environmental sustainability, which now is enshrined in Austrian constitutional law as a national aspiration. Ironically, the regulation of Austrian forests today grew from the efforts of early modern archdukes and prince bishops to protect the woods because of the critical role wood played in the mining industry. This form of environmental protection involved a forceful assertion of power over the local population.

Even more deeply, the regulation of forests in Austria is inextricable from the development of the modern state as a whole. Whereas in England, the first use of the term “common law” was as a contrast to the law of the forest, in Austria the growth of the national approach to law and governance was based in a meaningful degree on the regulation of  the woods, as the spirited legal historian Martin Schennach of the University of Innsbruck explains.

And so the beauty of the well-tended Austrian landscape, which today forms the life-blood of the tourist economy on which the nation depends; the restriction of private autonomy in relation not only to environmental resources but as a general matter of Austrian social life; the progressive vindication of an ideal of the public good; and the social hierarchy of the Mandarin administrative apparatus which took the place of royal authority—all were of a piece in the formation of Austrian identity. And these links can be perceived, and caught on film, shimmering and hovering about everyday Austrian life.

The video isn’t only about the protection of the forests. It’s called “Preservation Waltz,” and it also meditates on the principles of sustainability, community, and order in two other fields involving law and wood. The first area is Austrian domestic architecture, discussed by Karim Giese of the University of Salzburg, which prizes harmony and uniformity as a form of cultural sustainability. Construction law in Austria is guided by the same resistance to market liberalization present in Austrian forest law.

The second area is the preservation of books (made from paper, derived from wood). The video indeed is structured around a conversation with Renate Schönmayr, director of the University of Salzburg’s law library, which I hope playfully links its look at forest and construction law with larger cultural themes about what it means to conserve, safeguard, and study the past.

Want to learn more about Austrian forests and forest law? Here a link to an English-language section of the Austrian forest ministry. Here is the English translation of the Austrian forest report of 2015. And here is the contemporary, amended forest legislation in German. And here is the video:

The Storm King controversy

The recent Environmental History has a review by Ted Steinberg of Robert Lifset's Power on the Hudson: Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism (U Pittsburgh Press, 2014). Steinberg writes:

Con Ed seemed to be cruising toward its goal of building the plant when Scenic Hudson, an environmental group formed in 1963 to stop the project, began reckoning with the full ecological impact of the hydroelectric plant. Writer Robert Boyle had discovered that the Hudson River was alive with marine life. Boyle equated the prospect of licensing a plant in the Storm King area with the thought of slaughtering sheep in his own living room. The idea was slowly dawning on environmentalists that the hydroelectric plant would doom the river’s population of striped bass. Lifset argues that the introduction of ecological issues transformed the environmental movement in the Hudson Valley and helped lay the groundwork for its ultimate success.

This increased focus on ecology alone would never have led to the demise of Con Ed’s plans were it not for an equally important turn in the law that Lifset also explores in his book. In 1965 a federal appeals court ruled that Scenic Hudson was an aggrieved party and had the legal standing to launch a challenge to the Federal Power Commission with respect to Storm King. The decision reprimanded the power commission for failing to create an adequate evidentiary record, thereby foretokening the later implementation of environmental impact statements.

*****

Lifset offers a solid work of history that draws attention to the role of both ecological and energy issues in shaping environmentalism. His focus on legal change is also a welcome addition for those seeking a fuller understanding of the environmental movement. 

A River Runs Through It

[A new post from Mark Weiner. His previous post on this blog about Austrian law and landscape is here.]

My new video is about water, water law, Austrian identity, legal philosophy, concepts of the state, ideas of the public, approaches to time and tradition, metaphor, and some great old books. Plus, there’s a cameo appearance by a sweet Alpine cow:

The film is divided into two parts, held together within a single narrative frame: a day spent driving around beautiful Salzburg with a charismatic young legal scholar, Florian Lehne, who was eager to show off his country’s watery environment.

The first part of the film considers some of the ways Austrian law regulates water in a characteristically Austrian way—which is to say by vindicating the public interest and resisting market liberalization through strong assertions of state administrative authority. This part is centered around my trip with Florian.

The second part of the film meditates on Hans Kelsen’s pure theory of law, which in its strict formalism seeks to divorce conceptions of law and the state from politics. This part includes footage of Florian and a group of both young and well-established legal scholars from the University of Salzburg, the University of Vienna, and the University of Graz.

The division of the film into two parts serves a conceptual and methodological purpose, as well as a substantive one. Conceptually, it’s meant to underscore that different and sometimes divergent aspects of the same legal system can be connected by an underlying symbolic structure whose study is essential for understanding both the legal system’s details and larger issues of legal-cultural identity. Influenced by the work of Clifford Geertz in anthropology, I’ve explored this idea in a variety of ways since my first book, Black Trials, which sought to put that theory into practice through the techniques of literary-historical narrative. Film provides another method for pursuing this goal.

The film isn’t an illustrated lecture, and its purpose isn’t to make an analytic argument. Film makes its meaning through visual gestures and accompanying music and sound. But I’d like to note something about the origin of the film’s main idea: that post-war Austrian identity rests on an ideal of the public interest embodied in elite managerial institutions, and that this ideal represents a curious echo of monarchy within a modern social democratic state.

It isn’t surprising that this structure of thinking and identity should be reflected in water law. The beauty of the Austrian environment is one of the essential foundations of the modern Austrian sense of national self—the Austrian “brand,” both internally and externally, is as the land of mountains and Mozart. Austrians constructed this national self-understanding in significant part after World War II as part of an effort to differentiate their country from Germany. And since the 1970s it has been essential to the country’s economic health, which rests significantly on tourism.

Austrians have protected this cultural resource by nurturing the view that strong government authority is integral to their political community. It’s for this reason that environmental law, the individual experience of water, constitutional jurisprudence, and the individual experience of government all share a common symbolic structure—and that this structure can be captured in film.

A final word for the technically-oriented readers of this blog. The film was shot on a Panasonic Lumix GH4 at 25 fps—that’s to keep images under European PAL lights from flickering—a hard lesson learned a couple years back after I shot 24 fps under fluorescent bulbs in university offices). The audio was recorded internally with a small, expensive Senheiser shotgun mic and a rudimentary lav. A few clips also were shot with my iPhone, in NTSC rates. Most of the shots are hand-held, including the pans, and were steadied in post, though the interviews use a tripod. I edited with a MacBook Pro using Adobe Premier Pro, After Effects, and a smattering of Audition. When the film comes together, I’ll be relying on Audition and Speedgrade for the finishing touches.  As with the video I posted back in January, this is do-it-yourself, micro-budget filmmaking, which I hope gives it a distinctive feel and perspective.

Prior appropriation: A reassessment

Lawrence MacDonnell has posted "Prior Appropriation: A Reassessment". (The doctrine is a central aspect of water law in the western United States, according to which water is allocated to users on a "first in time" basis--for more, see here.) The short abstract explains that the paper "provides an overview of the literature critiquing the Prior Appropriation Doctrine, examines the historical evolution of the doctrine, and offers recommendations for modernizing its major concepts." The introduction explains (footnotes omitted):

Thoughtful observers have declared the law of prior appropriation obsolete, no longer relevant, or even dead. On the other hand, others have declared it the best-suited law yet devised to govern human uses of water, especially in water-limited places. Many writers have criticized at least some aspects of the law of prior appropriation. As further explored below, the criticisms take many forms. Far less has been written about the virtues of prior appropriation despite the tact that principles originated in the mining districts of nineteenth-century California ended up being adopted by seventeen western states.

Leaving aside that MacDonnell counts me upon the supporters of the doctrine (see p. 231), a characterization I'm not sure I agree with, the article is a good survey of much of the literature about the doctrine, pro and con. The following part, in particular, caught my eye (footnotes omitted again):

Elwood Mead was an early critic of the self-initiation form of prior appropriation. In his 1903 classic, Irrigation Institutions, he stated:

"The whole principle is wrong. It is wrong in principle as well as faulty in procedure. It assumes that the establishment of titles to the snows on the mountains and the rains falling on the public land and the water collected in fie lakes and rivers, on the use of which the development of the state in a great measure depends, is a private matter. It ignores public interests in a resource upon which the enduring prosperity of the community must rest. It is like A suing B for control of properly which belongs to C. Many able attorneys hold that these decreed rights will in time be held invalid because when they were established the public, the real owner of the property, did not have its day in court."

Colorado attorney Moses Lasky [right] pointed to the strong bias against administrative decision making in the United States during the era in which prior appropriation developed, the preference (and even necessity) for individual assertion of rights under frontier conditions, and the strong preference among common-law trained lawyers for determination of legal rights by courts in the context of a specific dispute. Because of the widespread adoption of permitting systems by 1928, Lasky concluded that "[t]oday prior-appropriation is the law nowhere in the West."

Mead's prediction didn't exactly come true, but doctrines such as reserved rights have indeed subordinated decreed private rights to public interest. I'm not sure Lasky's characterization of nineteenth-century America as being opposed to administrative decision-making stands the test of time, but his recognition that by the twentieth century the system had become an administrative one is right on.

Peter Sand on Karl Neumeyer as precursor of transnational environmental law

Alongside the thread on early environmental law courses, people have been wondering about the first environmental law textbook. Today Peter H. Sand, Lecturer in International Environmental Law at the University of Munich, joins us for a guest post on a contender for the title (see also his comment here). Peter writes [notes are after the jump]:

The history of international environmental law as an academic topic is generally associated with the emergence of treaties and case law on specific sectors such as shared watercourses, the oceans, or – from 1900 onwards – selected wildlife species. Doctrinal attempts at identifying common (trans-sectoral) elements, and a coherent discipline of international regulation and governance in this field, did not make their appearance until well into the second half of the 20^th century, with a prevailing and near-exclusive focus on public international law.

One notable exception was the pioneering work of Karl Alexander Neumeyer (1869-1941), who approached the subject from his distinct perspective of conflict of laws, in a monumental four-volume treatise titled Internationales Verwaltungsrecht (International Administrative Law, 1910-1936).[1] His life-time vision was the development of a new unified system of rules applicable to the transnational aspects of administrative law, to match the well-established conflict rules of private international law and procedure. And in the process, as part of an effort to demonstrate the pragmatic foundations of his approach in different sectors of public administration, he also assembled and analyzed a unique compendium of contemporary legal source materials that would indeed qualify today as typical ‘transnational environmental law’.

Chapter 8 in volume 2 of Neumeyer’s treatise (pp. 1-135), published in 1922, was headed Naturkräfte und Naturerzeugnisse (forces and products of nature). The first section, dealing with internationally shared water resources and water power, is based on the author’s earlier study of “water uses in international administrative law” (1915),[2] criticizing the rigid territorial sovereignty principle invoked by the Austrian Administrative High Court in the notorious 1913 Leitha River case,[3] and advocating the reciprocal protection of foreign legal interests along the lines of the 1909 US-Canadian Boundary Waters Treaty.[4] Other sections deal with the transboundary regulation of mineral resources; agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing (based in part on the author’s early practical experience as law clerk at a district court in the Bavarian-Austrian border region); and the management and conservation of marine living resources, including a discussion of the 1893 Bering Sea fur seals arbitration.[5] Karl Neumeyer’s emphasis on the need for a mutual ‘other-regarding’ accommodation of foreign concerns, across the entire spectrum of nature-related topics, was way ahead of his times.

Neumeyer taught international law – with a focus on history and conflict of laws – at the University of Munich from 1901 onwards, until the Nazi regime forced him into retirement in 1934 because of his Jewish ancestry and barred him from continuing to work with the Hague Academy of International Law (where he had first lectured in 1923) and the Institut de Droit International (which had elected him to full membership in 1926).[6] Ultimately, when he was notified of the impending eviction from his house and the confiscation of his library, he and his wife decided to commit suicide on 16 July 1941.[7] There is a memorial tablet at their former home near the university; a Neumeyer-Strasse in the city; and in 2008, the Munich Law Faculty (whose dean he was in 1931-32) named the building that houses its Institute of International Law (which he had helped to create) in Karl Neumeyer’s honor and memory. 

Rechtstaat and Recht in the German nuclear power debate

The latest Law and History Review has an article by Michael Hughes, "Rechtsstaat and Recht in West Germany's Nuclear Power Debate, 1975–1983".  The article begins:

Germans have long prided themselves on their commitment to the Rechtsstaat, the state based on the rule of law. However, they have not agreed on what would constitute a Rechtsstaat. Recht can mean “law,” or “right,” or “justice,” leaving open what a Rechtsstaat ought to establish. Moreover, a Rechtsstaat could be merely formal, an independently adjudicated process of applying statutes equally binding for all, or substantive, a process providing “justice.” Formal processes should minimize capricious decisions but could, in particular cases, produce outcomes that citizens perceived as unjust, and people are generally most committed to outcomes they believe to be just or appropriate. Not surprisingly, a complex debate developed among jurists, across a century and multiple regimes, over what the Rechtsstaat and Recht might mean.

Hans Weingartz,
Anti-AKW-Demonstration auf dem Bonner Hofgarten am 14. Oktober 1979

Nonjurists could also clash over the meanings of Recht and Rechtsstaat, as West Germans did in vigorous, often militant, clashes over nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s. For proponents of nuclear power, Germany's economic future and the viability of the legal-political order were at stake in efforts to implement energy-policy decisions that had been reached democratically and according to legal and constitutional norms. For opponents, the life and health of current and future generations and the maintenance of a free society were at stake in preventing the construction of dangerous nuclear facilities, even if the political and legal processes had formally approved them. Germans on both sides of the issue appealed to Recht and the Rechtsstaat, but they did not agree about what that meant in practice. And whereas those citizens often replayed scholarly disputes, disputes over the Rechtsstaat and Recht were not for them purely academic exercises, but rather vital elements in a struggle in which, they believed, the stakes were life or death, freedom or oppression. And because Recht and Rechtsstaat were and are so complex, West Germans (individually and in association) had to choose among varying conceptions, often out of conviction but sometimes out of expediency.