The future of climate change policy may be decided in a federal courtroom rather than on Capitol Hill. In recent years, state attorneys general and environmentalist groups have brought lawsuits seeking to force action on the issue of climate change under a range of statutes and legal theories. One case, Massachusetts v. EPA, was argued before the Supreme Court in November 2006. More are on the way....

Under modern constitutional law, rights in real property are protected principally by the Just Compensation Clause of the Fifth Amendment (incorporated as against the states by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause) and the substantive component of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clauses. For the past several decades, however, these rights have been disfavored in the federal courts. Even as there was a renaissance for constitutional protection of property rights in the late 1980s and early 1990s, property owners were losing the ability to vindicate these rights in federal courts. By 1997, property owners in the Ninth Circuit
could invoke neither the protections of the Takings Clause or the substantive component of due process when faced with objectionable land use regulation....

This is the first issue following our twenty-fifth anniversary. Audio and video from the 25th National Lawyers Convention is online. In addition, we are pleased to announce that the transcripts of nearly all of the panel debates will be published in various law reviews this coming year, including The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Texas Review of Law and Policy, The William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, The New York Journal of Law and Liberty, Ave Maria Law Review, Hofstra Law Review, Regent University Law Review, The Southern New England Roundtable Symposium Law Journal, The SMU Technology Law Review, The University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review, and The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. Publication details appear on the individual webpage for each panel in our new Multimedia Archive. Consequently, we will not be publishing the transcripts as an issue of Engage this year; our next issue will be in June.

The Federalist Society's Environmental Law & Property Rights Practice Group presented this debate at the 2007 Annual National Lawyers Convention on November 16, 2007. The panelists included Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Mr. James S. Burling of the Pacific Legal Foundation as the moderator.