The symposium on Breaking the Logjam: An Environmental Law for the 21st Century will be held at New York University School of Law, 40 Washington Square South, New York, New York, on Friday March 28 and Saturday March 29, 2008. The symposium will feature a diverse group of over 30 environmental experts proposing innovative solutions to a broad range of both old and new environmental problems confronting the U.S.
An environmental logjam has been building in the United States for over two decades. Most of our current environmental statutes were enacted in the 1970s. Sharp polarization has entrenched outmoded regulatory approaches. The symposium speakers will diagnose the roots of current failures and present specific changes in US law to address problems such as climate change, degradation of marine ecosystems, waste management failures, unregulated factory farms, urban congestion, and paralysis in management of the public lands.
The symposium is jointly organized by New York Law School, NYU School of Law and the NYU Environmental Law Journal. The project leaders are David Schoenbrod (NYLS), Richard B. Stewart (NYU), and Katrina Wyman (NYU). The symposium is the first component of a larger NYU-NYLS Breaking the Logjam project to develop a package of concrete legislative reform proposals to build a new generation of U.S. environmental programs to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. The symposium papers will be published in the NYU Environmental Law Journal. The project organizers will synthesize the proposals in a report for comprehensive reform to the new Congress and President, and also in a book for a general audience.
Breaking the Logjam is based on four fundamental principles that will inform and integrate the specific proposals presented at the symposium:
- 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.