After Ginsburg, No One On The SC Has Any Particular Interest In Environment, Environmental Law
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"If the Trump administration is able to get her successor confirmed ... it could mean that the environment always loses in the Supreme Court for a whole generation," said Bob Percival, head of the University of Maryland's environmental law program. Ginsburg was not an administrative law buff — her speciality and passion was civil procedure — but she was always engaged in environmental cases and frequently played a determinative role. "In the environmental cases, she often asked the questions that guided the final opinion," said John Cruden, the former assistant attorney general of the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Department of Justice.
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But perhaps most importantly, Ginsburg's Laidlaw ruling established a broad view of environmental groups' standing to sue. Ginsburg held that Friends of the Earth had suffered "injury in fact" and therefore had standing because they had risen "reasonable concerns" about the discharges and that they affected their "recreational, aesthetic, and economic interests."
That holding had enormous consequences for the ability of environmental groups to bring lawsuits without being dismissed in an early stage of the case. At the time of the decision, conservatives like the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia were taking an increasingly narrow view of standing, said Vermont Law School professor Pat Parenteau.
Scalia, Parenteau said, was "engaged in a slash and burn campaign through the law of environmental standing, erecting ever higher barriers for citizen access to federal courts." But Ginsburg, he said, "turned the tables and convinced Justice Anthony Kennedy to join an opinion recognizing that citizens who have a 'reasonable concern' that violations of environmental laws could harm their use of natural resources was enough to have their cases heard."
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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1063714165
