stlmag.com^ July 2019
Many of the recent efforts to weaken various regulations seem to
be “Trump trying to undo Obama for the sake of undoing Obama,”
says Maxine Lipeles, director of the Interdisciplinary Environmental
Clinic at the Washington University School of Law. So far, the current
administration hasn’t made too big a dent in 50 years of environmen-
tal law. That could change, though.
“The people at the EPA—first Scott Pruitt and now Andrew
Wheeler—came in with a very specific mission of rolling back a lot of
environmental law, so in a sense, that’s more of a threat,” Lipeles says.
“They have experience. Some of this they tried to do in the adminis-
tration of George W. Bush and failed, and now they’re trying again.”
Lipeles’ clinic wrote a brief in support of the American Bottom
Conservancy, a grassroots organization that was concerned about
arsenic and other heavy metals floating out of the Veolia hazardous
waste incinerators in Sauget, Illinois. “In the final days of the Obama
administration, the EPA finalized an upgraded permit that required
Veolia to continuously monitor which heavy metals were being released
in a gaseous form,” says Lipeles, “and also do more monitoring of what
kinds of waste they were feeding into this incinerator—how much
arsenic, mercury, and lead. The company immediately appealed the
permit, and the EPA caved.”
In the words of an EPA spokesperson: “The January 2017 permit
would have required Veolia to, among other things, install and operate,
for a period of at least 12 calendar months, continuous multi-metals
monitoring devices on each of Veolia’s three incineration units. In
July 2018, EPA proposed to no longer require the multi-metals moni-
toring devices in the permit.” Instead, Veolia was to install activated
carbon injection systems to remove mercury emissions from the
two incinerators that didn’t have those systems yet. The company
said this would better protect the environment than the continuous
multi-metals monitoring. Veolia would continue to monitor its metal
emissions with periodic sampling and analysis.
“We are currently reviewing the many comments we received during
the public comment period,” which ended in November, the spokesper-
son said. “EPA has not yet made a final decision on the revised permit.”
Once the agency does finalize the permit, anyone still concerned about
the absence of continous multi-metals monitoring would need to file
a formal petition with the agency’s Environmental Appeals Board.how people may enter into contracts; it
can track the use of what’s protected by a
copyright license. A lot of what’s caused
Facebook and other social media such
headaches wouldn’t happen with block-
chain, because everything would be veri-
fied first—instantly.
Because the data can’t be copied or
corrupted, “banks are suddenly get-
ting interested,” Kahn says. Investors
are buying in. Law practices are adding
blockchain as a specialization. “And
nobody really knows exactly where this
is headed—except that five years from
now, we’ll be as familiar with blockchain
as we are with Google.”
- THE END OF PORN PROSECUTION -
“I know it when I see it,” U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Potter Stewart once said,
sidestepping a more definitive catego-
rization of hardcore pornography. Dis-
putes over what qualified as obscenity
had long plagued the highest court of
the land.
“Every time one of these porno films
got up to the Supreme Court, they’d go
down to the viewing room with their
clerks, and they would vote,” Kahn says,
chuckling. “Thurgood Marshall, who was
a character, used to sit up in the top row
and crack off-color jokes to drive the
chief justice crazy. In desperation, they
came up with a standard.”
The case was Miller v. California, a
landmark 1973 decision that changed
the definition of obscenity from that
of “utterly without socially redeeming
value” to that which lacks “serious liter-
ary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
That left plenty of room for argu-
ment—but now that whole swath of legal
dispute has been washed away by the
internet. “The grossest possible stuff
became available to everyone,” Kahn
explains. “There are still people out there
railing against it, mainly from the pulpit,
but there are no more prosecutions.”
First, porn is so prevalent, it’d be
tough to make criminal charges stick.
Second, he notes, “one of the elements
of this obscenity test was that you had to
prove it was patently offensive by local
community standards—and no matter
where you are, everything is so available
that if you’re a defense lawyer, you’re
going to have a field day.”
AIRING IT OUT
A LOCAL LOOK AT ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
UNDER THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION