In the News

The Trump-named anti-worker National Labor Relations Board majority hit a very sour note this year when it tried to use a case involving Musicians Local 23’s informational leafletting to write new national restrictions on workers exercising their rights. The 3-0 ruling on Aug. 31 by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals called the board’s limits “arbitrary and capricious.” The ruling was yet another in a long line of federal appellate court defeats for the former GOP Trump regime and its constant attempts to write agency rules in favor of the corporate class. NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity, which tracked such rulings, reported the Trump government lost such cases 77% of the time (59 wins, 200 losses).

No longer a risk of the distant future, a failure to tackle climate-change risk could cost the world $1.7 trillion a year by 2025—according to a report released in March by New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. In what its authors believe to be “the largest-ever expert survey of the economics of climate change,” the “overwhelming consensus” among the 738 economists canvassed concludes that inaction will be costlier than action, and that “immediate, aggressive emissions reductions are economically desirable.”

Justin Gundlach noted that in its climate lawsuit against Big Oil, the city pointed out that “the number of days in New York City with rainfall at or above two inches is projected to increase by as much as 67% by the 2020s and the number of days with rainfall at or above four inches is projected to increase by as much as 67% by the 2020s and 133% by the 2080s.”

Housing, public health, transportation and other policy areas cannot be managed effectively if we fail to consider their interactions with the climate. Shrinking from this compound task might mean taking an easier path, but doing so will leave it to the climate to determine our city’s fate.

Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney for the left-leaning Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said he hoped states like Pennsylvania – which control most drilling regulations and tend to be friendlier to it than the federal government – will follow the Biden administration's example of curtailing fossil fuel development while ramping up renewable energy production.

Republican governors across the United States have enacted legislation that will likely fuel the spread of COVID. A new op-ed published by legal expert Richard Revesz examines the governors' failure to properly mitigate the spread of COVID and their misunderstanding of federalism.

For the first time, the Congressional Review Act was invoked to disapprove regulations—including at the EPA—promulgated by a prior Republican administration, writes Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. The Biden administration also found ways to undo several other Trump-era rules without using either the CRA or rulemaking, he writes, and explains how.

Two key principles define American federalism. First, states can generally pursue policies favored by their people, even if other states prefer different policies. But, second, states cannot pursue policies that seriously harm other states. Due to interstate mobility, infections resulting from inadequate policies in Florida will harm other states, burdening their healthcare systems, increasing their healthcare costs, and worsening the wellbeing of their citizens and the state of their economies. 

The newly proposed standards for model years 2023 through 2025 are not particularly ambitious, resulting in smaller emissions reductions than those that the Obama administration had prescribed back in 2012. But, maybe more importantly, they hint at the direction of future vehicle standards.

Though the report is likely to be cited often in litigation, its biggest imprint will be on establishing a social cost of carbon, said Richard Revesz, a law professor and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU. “That’s the building block used to justify the stringency of regulation across many, many agencies,” he said.