\nit is worth remembering that Justice Stevens came to the Court in 1975, at the
\ndawn of the modern environmental movement and amid a heady time for
\nenvironmentalists in the courts. Just a few years earlier, in a dissent
\nfrom the landmark case Sierra Club v. Morton<\/a> (1972), Stevens’ predecessor, Justice William O. Douglas, had famously argued
\nthat natural resources such as trees and rivers should have “standing,”
\npositing that if corporations are permitted to represent their interests in
\ncourt then so too should other inanimate objects. Meanwhile, in cases of
\nstatutory interpretation, judges on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the
\nD.C. Circuit had developed a number of doctrines that allowed them to
\naggressively second-guess agency decision-making in order to realize the broad
\nand ambitious goals of environmental statutes. These developments invigorated environmentalists, but they also
\nintroduced a sense of permissive creativity into a rapidly growing body of
\nenvironmental law, and exposed judges who made pro-environmental rulings to
\nallegations of judicial activism.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Justice <\/p>\n Those <\/p>\n In <\/p>\n Finally, and <\/p>\n Justice Stevens should be remembered as a great justice Related Links:<\/strong><\/p>\n The hazards of using toxic coal ash for land development<\/a><\/p>\n What the John Paul Stevens retirement means for energy progress<\/a><\/p>\n
\nStevens, by contrast, firmly rejected the idea that environmentalism was some
\nsort of transcendental force that gave judges special powers to enforce broad
\nstatutory goals on their own and overrule regulatory agencies. Most
\nfamously, in Chevron v. NRDC<\/a> (1984), he
\nwrote a majority opinion for the Court that sternly rebuked the D.C. Circuit
\nfor substituting its judgment for that of the Reagan EPA, which had sought to
\ngive industry more flexibility in meeting their Clean Air Act obligations.
\nThough a bitter defeat for environmentalists, Chevron, which holds that
\njudges must defer to agencies when they make a reasonable judgment about an
\nambiguous law, is rightly hailed today as a landmark of both administrative law
\nand judicial restraint.<\/p>\n
\nsame principles—deference to the plain language of statutes and concern about
\njudicial restraint—are the hallmarks of Justice Stevens’ other landmark
\nenvironmental rulings, which have rightly earned Stevens the enduring gratitude
\nof the environmental world. In Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter Of Communities For A Great Oregon<\/a> (1995), Justice Stevens wrote for a six -Justice
\nmajority in reinstating the portion of the Endangered Species Act that protects
\nendangered species’ habitats, which had been struck down by the D.C. Circuit
\n(which by then had been taken over by Reagan and Bush appointees). This time, Justice Stevens’ opinion corrected
\nthe D.C. Circuit’s narrow reading of an environmental statute by finding that
\nthe language and intent of the Endangered Species Act was clear in forbidding
\nchanges to habitats that will harm endangered species.<\/p>\n
\n2002, Justice Stevens wrote another rule-of-law environmental opinion in Sierra
\nPreservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a “takings” case
\nthat followed a 15-year period during which the Court’s conservatives, led by
\nJustice Scalia, had been remarkably inventive in trying to transform the
\nTakings Clause of the Fifth Amendment into a barrier to environmental
\nlaws. Rejecting this bending of the Constitution’s meaning, Justice
\nStevens garnered another six-Justice majority in upholding land-use protections
\nput in place to save Lake Tahoe. The
\nruling returned the Takings Clause to its more limited role as a guard for securing compensation for landowners when
\nthe government exercises its power of eminent domain.<\/p>\n
\nperhaps most famously, in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), Justice Stevens
\nrelied on Chevron and the unambiguously broad terms of the Clean Air Act
\nin holding that the EPA may regulate greenhouse gas pollution using its
\nexisting authority under the Act. This ruling has allowed the Obama
\nAdministration to aggressively combat global warming without waiting for
\nfurther action by Congress, setting into motion a chain of regulatory actions<\/a> that has led to the nation’s very first nationwide auto emissions
\nstandards aimed at greenhouse gases, and may soon lead to the nation’s first
\nrestrictions on CO2 emissions from power plants.<\/p>\n
\nin environmental cases, not because he bent the law to favor environmental
\noutcomes, but rather because he insisted that the law itself, which dictates
\nenvironmental outcomes in many cases, be followed. <\/p>\n