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Climate science plays a central role in climate litigation, and cases under the Takings Clause of the United States' and many state constitutions are no exception. In the climate context, takings cases to date have involved claims that challenge the constitutionality of both adaptation and mitigation measures. For instance, real estate developers have claimed that land use and zoning regulations that seek to reduce exposure to climate change impacts constitute regulatory takings. Property owners have claimed that restrictions on the development of fossil fuel infrastructure upset their investment-backed expectations. And property owners adversely impacted by climate-related flood control measures have sought compensation for their harms. In these and other cases, the foreseeability of climate change impacts and the causal connections between local action and global climate change may or may not be explicit elements of a claim, but they remain critical issues for litigants and courts to address. This paper explicates the role of attribution science in climate-related takings cases. That science factors into plaintiffs' claims, government defenses, and judicial decisions. For the purposes of this analysis, this paper examines how marshalling the best available climate change attribution science could bolster governments' defenses of climate regulations. The next section reviews the legal framework for takings cases and provides a brief primer on attribution science. The paper then turns to three legal themes: (1) linking local mitigation to global impacts, (2) resetting expectations about how land can be used and, (3) relevant to flood control cases, the relative benefits conferred by imperfect flood control measures. As we shall see, attribution science has a clear and important role to play in how courts resolve climate change-related takings claims.

Utilizing the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and technologies of the self, this qualitative action research study explored how power dynamics inherent in higher education can be recognized and resisted as first-year writing students journal on the transition to college (JTC). Conducted in a suburban community college in the Mid-Atlantic United States during the Spring 2020 semester, the study investigated how college is a feature of governmentality, how writing instructors' actions interrupt or reinforce college as governmentality, and if journaling on the transition to college acts as a technology of the self, in light of the ways college governs. Journal prompts provided students opportunities to critically reflect on the institution of college and their experience entering this new space. Foucauldian concepts were not taught, but they informed the journal design. Black feminist theory supplemented the Foucauldian theoretical framework to address factors of students' intersectional social identities emergent in JTC and relative to their experiences with power in college. Findings indicated students confront institutional power structures including economic power, grades, policies, and institutional White supremacy, all of which affect professors' role as authority figures. Underrepresented students experience power much differently than those belonging to dominant groups and JTC provides instructors with insight to interrupt oppressive power through feedback. Writing instructors' implementation of JTC allows them to disrupt governmentality and provides students a technology of the self through which they develop agency. Though disruptive, COVID-19 provided unexpected opportunities to apply Foucauldian concepts to teaching and learning during emergency remote instruction.

The shipping industry is a huge component of the world economy, and although it is often described as an efficient mode of transport, it still contributes as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as a major industrialized nation. Efficiency technologies and practices are available that would significantly lessen shipping's environmental impact, but "amazing loophole[s]" in international environmental law and a set of market failures have prevented them from being widely adopted. These problems have been studied before, but the public regulatory proposals being discussed run into steep, if not insurmountable obstacles. This Note argues that shipping inefficiency can be better addressed through private environmental governance. By operating privately, these forms of governance bypass the problems that traditional public regulation faces, allowing higher efficiency standards to be widely adopted without depending on political will. In so doing, private governance can better align the incentives of consumers, firms, and those firms' suppliers.

This Article explores how private governance can reduce the climate effects of global civil aviation. The civil aviation sector is a major contributor to climate change, accounting for emissions comparable to a top ten emitting country. National and international governmental bodies have taken important steps to address civil aviation, but the measures adopted to date are widely acknowledged to be inadequate. Civil aviation poses particularly difficult challenges for government climate mitigation efforts. Many civil aviation firms operate globally, emissions often occur outside of national boundaries, nations differ on their respective responsibilities, and demand is growing rapidly. Although promising new technologies are emerging, they will take time to develop and adopt. This Article argues that private initiatives can overcome many of these barriers. Private initiatives can motivate civil aviation firms to act absent government pressure at the national level and can create pressure for mitigation that transcends national boundaries. The Article argues that it is time to develop a private climate governance agenda for civil aviation and identifies examples of the types of existing and new initiatives that could be included in the effort. If public and private policymakers can overcome the tendency to focus almost exclusively on public governance, private initiatives can yield large and prompt emissions reductions from global civil aviation, buy time for more comprehensive government measures, and complement the government measures when they occur.

On January 20, 2017, Inauguration Day, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School launched the Climate Deregulation Tracker, the first of what would become numerous online trackers, news reports, academic analyses, and other resources designed to spotlight the Trump administration's use and abuse of executive authority to pursue its agenda to cut back on government regulations and to promote the extraction and use of fossil fuels. The Climate Deregulation Tracker has had a relatively narrow purpose: to keep tabs on the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the federal government's climate-related regulations and policies and help inform members of the public so they more effectively voice their views on deregulation. In the almost four years since its launch, the Tracker has logged 159 executive branch actions that fit the bill. President Trump's actions have frequently taken the form of executive orders that describe national policies, such as prioritizing fossil fuel production and distribution, emphasizing economic uses of natural resources, expediting federal environmental reviews for infrastructure projects, and decreasing emissions and efficiency standards across the board. The President's executive orders have resulted in numerous agency actions designed to achieve outcomes consistent with the orders' stated policies. Examples include rules delaying, rescinding, and replacing greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants, automobiles, oil and gas operations and landfills, and the revocation of policies and guidance that incorporate climate impacts into federal permitting, investment and other decision making.