Environmental Dispute Resolution

Abstract

“The way the law worked, people were afraid to go in and clean up a brownfield site for the fear that they would be liable if a suit was ever brought for cleanup of that site.” Litigation is the civilized remedy of last resort for environmental disputes. The litigation process is often costly, slow, and potentially injurious to the reputations of individuals and firms. Environmental law flourished in the United States as a direct result of a series of environmental statutes adopted in the 1970s and 1980s, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, which gave rise to the Superfund trust fund used to clean up hazardous waste sites. Global environmental concerns over acid deposition, deforestation, and global warming threaten international conflict, with fewer formal avenues of last resort.

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