Essay by Oliver A. Houck
This Essay examines three cases from the early 1970s that gave rise to modern environmental law. These courts did not legislate, nor did they prescribe new programs, but they met environmental abuses on a grand scale, knew what they were seeing, and rendered decisions that would change the American landscape. More accurately, they so upset an entrenched and unsustainable status quo that they enabled Congress to change it. It is no overstatement to say that the pollution abatement programs we know today arose from Republic Steel and Standard Oil, that Izzak Walton drove forestry management into the twentieth century, and that we owe the contemporary management of federal public lands, fully one-sixth of the United States to NRDC v. Morton. These courts earned their keep and, before they fade from memory, we owe them recognition.
About the Author
Oliver A. Houck. Professor of Law, Tulane University. Copyright (c) 1996 Oliver A. Houck.
Citation
70 Tul. L. Rev. 2279 (1996)