Noga Morag-Levine, Michigan State University College of Law, has posted Uniform and Locally Tailored Emissions Standards in American and European Air Pollution Law: The Impact of Historical Regulatory Traditions, which also appears in the Columbia Law Review Forum:
This Piece operates at the intersection of comparative environmental law and legal history. It introduces a novel distinction between two paradigms of technology-based pollution standards: the first, uniform across all places and environmental conditions, and the second, tailored to local environmental and economic circumstances. It then compares the air pollution regimes of the United States and the European Union with an eye to the relative place of the two types of standards within each regime. This Piece finds that, in general, uniform standards characterize European regulation, whereas American regulation favors tailored standards. This Piece argues that longstanding historical differences between Continental and Anglo-American approaches to regulating pollution are at the root of this transatlantic difference. Uniform technology standards accord with the permitting practices of France, Germany, and other European countries going back to the early Industrial Era. By contrast, tailored standards fit with the localist sensibilities of English common law-based environmental regulation going back centuries. This Piece seeks to illuminate the historical origins of transnational differences in environmental policy and how this history continues to shape contemporary environmental choices and debates.--Dan Ernst
