While much climate news is delineating the potentially-discouraging implications of the new US president-elect’s policy preferences for global climate policy, it is worth noting there are some policy developments moving in the opposite direction.
If you are not up to speed on Our Children’s Trust’s work, check it out at http://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/ Best, Ron From: Mary Wood [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2016 2:18 PM To: Ronald Mitchell <[email protected]> Subject: Breaking news: opinion handed down by J. Aiken in federal climate case >From Mary Wood, UO Law: Today, Judge Ann Aiken issued a momentous opinion that takes government's climate policy into the constitutional public trust realm. The opinion speaks to the underpinnings of sovereignty itself. For the first time in history, a U.S. federal judge has expressed "no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society. Just as marriage is the 'foundation of the family,' a stable climate system is quite literally the foundation 'of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.’" This deeply thoughtful opinion ends by drawing upon 9th Cir. Judge Goodwin’s words from a recent law review article. Judge Aiken writes: Federal courts too often have been cautious and overly deferential in the arena of environmental law, and the world has suffered for it. As Judge Goodwin recently wrote, The current state of affairs ... reveals a wholesale failure of the legal system to protect humanity from the collapse of finite natural resources by the uncontrolled pursuit of short-term profits.... [T]he modern judiciary has enfeebled itself to the point that law enforcement can rarely be accomplished by taking environmental predators to court…. The third branch can, and should, take another long and careful look at the barriers to litigation created by modern doctrines of subject-matter jurisdiction and deference to the legislative and administrative branches of government. Alfred T. Goodwin, A Wake-Up Call/or Judges, 2015 Wis. L. Rev. 785, 785-86, 788 (2015). Judge Aiken’s full opinion has been posted at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/571d109b04426270152febe0/t/5824e85e6a49638292ddd1c9/1478813795912/Order+MTD.Aiken.pdf Our Children’s Trust, the organization that spearheaded this case, is holding a press conference at 4 pm at the federal courthouse. I know it will be of great interest to many of you, and I plan to attend as well. MW Mary Christina Wood Philip H. Knight Professor Faculty Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center University of Oregon School of Law 1515 Agate St. Eugene, OR 97403-1221 (541) 346-3842 [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Mary Wood's book, Nature's Trust: <http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/academic_discountpromotion/?site_locale=en_US&code=WOOD13> Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, was published by Cambridge University Press in October, 2013. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
