This essay and the longer paper it is based on were written for the Law of Abundance project at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Economy and Society. It is an extraordinary fact about the 2024 election that the areas that turned most aggressively toward President Trump were cities and states that have long been…
In 2023, I used this blog to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision in Calcutt v. FDIC as “unnecessary, unfortunate, and unpersuasive, all at the same time.” So I felt vindicated when, last week, in FDA v. Wages & White Lion Investments, the Court clarified that it didn’t really mean what it said in Calcutt. Along…
Ideally, the abundance agenda would be completely bipartisan. Getting American building again will require a mix of deregulation (permitting reform, zoning changes, preemption), improvements in state capacity (civil service reform, limiting court review, changes to procurement rules), and targeted investments (for infrastructure, critical industries, and R&D). The emphasis on deregulation may appeal more naturally to…
The House Natural Resource Committee has released its portion of the draft reconciliation bill that’s working its way through Congress. Among other things, the committee draft includes a provision that aims to make NEPA unenforceable in the courts. The way the provision works is totally wild, and it’s worth some extended attention since it stands…
A couple of weeks ago, my kitchen started to smell like sewage. The garbage disposal began to drip. The dishwasher wouldn’t drain. The toilet bubbled when my kids emptied the kitchen sink. At first, I thought the root problem was the broken disposal. But we fixed that and the kitchen still stank. Maybe it was…
An 88-mile rail line in a remote Utah desert was at the center of the Supreme Court’s bracing decision last Thursday in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. The legal battle over that tiny project has now led to a decision from the Court’s conservative majority that will shrink the role of environmental litigation…