blueblanketblogmy not-so-temporary blog, i guess wednesday, january 9Here's a pretty good article about the reach of Alexander v. Sandoval, which I'd talked about earlier. .: 12:04 PM .:tuesday, january 8So Ilana and I went to dim sum with some of our neighbors, Everett and Sarah (two atmospheric scientists, yay! Everett-- a prof at Howard, and Sarah, a scientist at NOAA), and our neighbors' friends. All good, super-nice people. But, as in many DC conversations, we eventually got to the topic of our jobs. Which meant that Ilana and I got asked what it's like doing environmental law for the Bush administration's Department of Justice. As I've said before, I'm pretty new, so it's hard for me to give any thorough evaluation of my experience. So far, I haven't done anything I feel terribly uncomfortable with. But it bothers me when friends of mine bring up how Bush is relaxing various air pollution controls regulations, because I don't agree with those actions and because I worry that eventually I'll be required to defend those actions in my job. I worry about that because, well, I don't want to. And I might not have to. I mean, we can preference the cases we want to work on, and I can try to limit my cases to just the goodie enforcement stuff that I came here for in the first place. So it's possible, maybe, that I can just avoid those cases (or at least a lot of them) that make me feel ideologically uncomfortable. But yeah, *someone* in our office will still have to work on those cases. But here's the brighter side of having even the defense-of-nasty-Bush-reg cases handled by pro-environment people: they can actually act like a buffer against the worse things proposed by the administration -- by explaining, for instance, the terrible legal drawbacks of what they propose, or by encouraging them to revise the regs. It works, and I've seen it work. And that's a good thing. Doesn't stop me from feeling mixed about this whole thing, though. .: 11:49 AM .:monday, january 7Abraham Bell and Gideon Parchomovsky, Givings, 111 YALE L.J. 547 .: 6:02 PM .: |
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