The Breaking the Logjam project is jointly organized by New York Law School, NYU School of Law and the NYU Environmental Law Journal and is led by NYLS Professor David Schoenbrod (212.431.2339, dschoenbrod@nyls.edu) and NYU Professors Richard B. Stewart (212.998.6170, stewartr@juris.law.nyu.edu) and Katrina M. Wyman (212.998.6033, wymank@juris.law.nyu.edu).  The Project Counsel is Carol A. Casazza Herman (cch332@nyu.edu) and Katherine Schoonover (ks1820@nyu.edu) is Director of Communications.

Objective 

The project is a response to the environmental logjam that has been building in the United States for more than two decades and shows no sign of breaking.  Congress has failed to pass major environmental legislation for nearly 20 years, partisanship has prevented progress, existing federal statutes have failed to solve longstanding problems, and the laws on the books are inadequate to address newer problems including climate change (see Background). But a consensus is emerging among a diverse group of environmental law experts. These reform environmentalists (see Participants) have joined forces in the Breaking the Logjam project to provide a blueprint for reform to the Congress and President to be elected this year.

Principles

Breaking the Logjam is based on four fundamental principles that inform and integrate the specific reform proposals:

• Cross-cutting regulatory approaches that address underlying causes.  Since many environmental problems cut across the boundaries established by existing regulatory programs, existing statutes must be restructured to match the true character of environmental problems and their underlying causes. 
  
  
• Openness about trade-offs.  New statutes must acknowledge that trade-offs are inevitable and ensure that they are made in public view based on reliable information.
  
  
• Scaling regulatory authority to the problem.  Statutes should empower states and trim the federal government’s role to what it can effectively do. Correspondingly, the federal government should work with other countries and international organizations to address global problems.
  
  
• Expanding the use of market incentives and information. The new statutes and regulatory programs need to harness the power of markets and information disclosure to increase environmental protection.

Many environmental scholars from the left and right have previously advocated these four reform principles, but only in general, abstract terms. The Breaking the Logjam project differs by harnessing all four principles together and proposing concrete reforms across a comprehensive range of environmental challenges with a continued effort to push these proposals to help ensure that they are implemented.

 

Symposium

To that end, over 40 environmental experts from academia, environmental groups, business, and government came together at NYU School of Law on March 28-29, 2008.  These experts presented specific proposals for new federal programs on climate and oceans and major changes in existing laws for air pollution, water pollution, endangered species, farm policy, grazing on the public lands, federal water policy, hazardous waste, nuclear waste, sprawl and smart growth, traffic congestion and transportation. In addition, experts presented proposals on cross-cutting topics  including environmental information systems, managerial strategies, improved regulatory science, and innovative regulatory approaches based on environmental services, property rights systems (including trading), taxes and subsidies as well as strategies for an appropriate division of regulatory responsibilities at the global, national, and state and local levels.

Further Activities

 

In the fall, the proposals and discussion presented at the conference will appear in a special issue of the NYU Environmental Law Journal.  The project will also issue a summary report  with a comprehensive package of reform proposals for presentation to the new Congress and the new administration. In 2009 it will issue a book presenting the project’s ideas and proposals for a general audience.

Continued discussion of the project's principles and proposals can be had on the Breaking the Logjam blog.