Scaling the baseline: Technicalities and environmental regulation in Owens Valley,California

If we want to understand the logic of environmental regulation—as well as its uneven effects—we should look to how regulators and regulated alike generate and deploy baselines. In this article, I chart the scalar frames used to mark the “natural” conditions that are perceived as normal, desirable, and worthy of legal protection and intervention. I explore these frames and resulting legal standards through the case of Owens Lake, California, which has long been a subject of state efforts to regulate resources and remediate pollution. This case study provides an opportunity to understand how presumed technicalities of environmental governance, such as baselines, are constructed and deployed.     

The “Right Paper”: Developing Legal Literacy in a Legal Self‐Help Clinic

Legal self‐help is the fastest‐growing segment of legal services in the United States, and a significant addition to the repertoire of programs aimed at opening up access to justice in the civil legal system. Few studies, however, have examined how such services work in practice. Through ethnographic research and analysis of meetings between unrepresented litigants and attorneys offering advice in a legal self‐help clinic, this article expands the empirical investigation of access to justice to consider what legal self‐help looks like in actual practice. In this article, I follow the concept of the “right paper” to analyze the process through which legal self‐help litigants develop legal literacy, including the role of lawyers in helping them to do so. The article concludes by discussing what such practices reveal about recent efforts to open up access to justice and also about the dynamics through which people come to think about law and, especially, how to use it.     

Offshore Wind: Government Control and the Regulatory Landscape

The open ocean, especially off the eastern seaboard of the United States, presents a significant opportunity for the generation of electricity with the development of offshore wind projects. The first offshore wind project commenced operation during 2016 with a five-turbine project in Rhode Island. It is anticipated this is the first of many offshore wind projects that are expected along the East Coast of the United States. The legal and regulatory landscape for the development of offshore wind projects is complex and expensive. Projects are typically fifteen miles offshore where the federal government has jurisdiction and is responsible for leasing the ocean bottom for projects. Additionally, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has jurisdiction with regard to the disturbance of the ocean bottom. The state's jurisdiction commences within three miles of the coast, where the principal role for the states will be permitting for transmission lines both offshore and onshore.