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24 Hous. L. Rev. 97 (1987)
Responsibilities of Regulatory Agencies under Environmental Laws

handle is hein.journals/hulr24 and id is 109 raw text is: PAPER RESPONSIBILITIES OF REGULATORY AGENCIES UNDER ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS The Honorable Antonin Scalia* The subject I have been assigned to address is Responsibili- ties of Regulatory Agencies with regard to environmental risks and liabilities. To the judicial mind, at least, the topic summons forth-particularly in this era of deregulation-thoughts of courts holding the agencies to account for the strict implementation of environmental protections that Congress has enacted and that (ac- cording to some) current administrators have willfully ignored. In- deed, it calls to mind my colleague Skelly Wright's stirring pro- logue to his opinion in the Calvert Cliffs case, the progenitor of the long and numerous line of NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act)1 cases: Several recently enacted statutes attest to the commitment of the Government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of ma- terial progress. But it remains to be seen whether the promise of this legislation will become a reality. Therein lies the judicial role .... Our duty ... is to see that important legislative pur- poses, heralded in the halls of Congress, are not lost or misdi- rected in the vast hallways of the federal bureaucracy.2 The burden of my remarks today is that an agency's responsibili- ties are not always that simple to discern; and that even where * Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court. Formerly, Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. A.B. 1957, Georgetown; LL.B. 1960. Harvard Law School. 1. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321-4361 (1982) (declar- ing a national policy to encourage productive harmony between man and his environment, promoting efforts to prevent damage to the environment, and establishing a Council on En- vironmental Quality). 2. Calvert Cliffs' Coordinating Comm., Inc. v. United States Atomic Energy Comm'n, 449 F.2d 1109, 1111 (D.C. Cir. 1971) (footnotes omitted).

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