2019

After noticing an increasing trend of controversial national injunctions, the University of Colorado Law School faculty decided it was time to unpack major issues surrounding immigration, health care and custody of children at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Byron White Center for Constitutional Law at CU Law School hosts the yearly Ira C. Rothgerber Conference, which covers various issues surrounding breaches of civil liberties and constitutional rights. This year, the theme was injunctions.

Associate Professor Scott Skinner-Thompson wrote a review for Slate about two new books that argue for an LGBTQ movement that benefits queer people beyond marriage, money, and family.

The steady drumbeat of warnings over the surge in risky corporate borrowing is growing louder and louder. Time and again, regulators in the U.S. and Europe have pointed to the hazards of businesses taking on too much debt. . . Some say regulators aren’t doing nearly enough to fix their blind spots. “I am not confident that regulators have or share among themselves the high-quality information that they need,” Erik F. Gerding, who specializes in financial regulation at University of Colorado Law School, said at a congressional hearing on leveraged loans on June 4. “We cannot wait until it is time to man the lifeboats to fully fund the iceberg patrol.”

Under the new policy, the attorney general must get written consent from tribes before taking certain actions that affect them. That's something few have put into practice, experts say. . . Yet federal agencies, as well as countries around the world, have been slow to implement policies to obtain tribes’ consent, even after endorsing the broad language of the U.N.’s 2007 declaration, said Carla Fredericks, director of the American Indian Law Clinic at the University of Colorado Law School. In a 2017 paper, Fredericks wrote that free, prior and informed consent is “currently an emerging norm and seen as an aspirational goal, rather than binding international law.” . . . Kristen Carpenter, a University of Colorado law professor who is a member of the United Nations’ Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, agreed that the policy announced by Washington’s attorney general last month “is much more specific than anything else I’ve seen around the world.” It may very well be the first time a state attorney general has adopted such a policy.

Colorado River states cheered this month when President Trump signed swiftly passed legislation ratifying a drought plan for the waterway. But they could be in for a legal fight. . . Some question whether the DCP should have qualified for another review under NEPA, or at least a supplemental assessment. "It is almost certainly true that the 2007 EIS is not adequate to flesh out the current impacts and alternatives for addressing the Colorado River drought," said Mark Squillace, of the University of Colorado Law School.

Podcast: Water has always been scarce in the West, but climate change and steady population growth require us to come up with more innovative ways to conserve water. In this week’s Brainwaves podcast, we talk to CU Boulder Senior Research Associate Douglas Kenney, who says the hard truth is, “we have to use less water.” We also look at "toilet to tap" initiatives; how the water that enters Vegas stays in Vegas; and what the science says about our water future.

Guest commentary: On April 16, 2019, Governor Jared Polis signed into law SB19-181, a bill that reforms oil and gas regulation in Colorado in several important ways. It’s a remarkable achievement for House Speaker KC Becker and other supporters who bent but did not break in the face of strong opposition from the oil and gas industry. And it is notable too because it comes on the heels of the defeat of Proposition 112, which would have required that any new oil and natural gas development be located at least 2,500 feet from any occupied structures or other “vulnerable” areas. This last phrase might well explain the Proposition’s defeat, since vulnerable areas were defined broadly to include such ubiquitous land features as irrigation canals and intermittent streams. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC or Commission) estimated that 85% of the non-federal land subject to the law would have been off-limits to development if Prop 112 had passed.