The Efficiency of Energy Efficiency: Improving Preemption of Local Energy Conservation Programs

Flickr/Jenn Durfey

Josh Zaharoff

The United States consumes an enormous amount of energy via our buildings and cars. Buildings and light vehicles in the U.S. use forty-six quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) in an average year, which represents over 10% of the total energy consumed worldwide. As global energy demands rise, climate change advances, and new technologies enter the marketplace, many states and localities have tried to push their economies in a greener direction. Often, these measures are centered on increasing energy efficiency for buildings (via new building codes) and cars (by regulating taxicabs). But state and local governments face a series of barriers to this effort, erected by federal courts announcing broad preemption decisions under the Clean Air Act (CAA) and Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA). This article identifies and argues against these high barriers to increasing energy efficiency.

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Gangsters to Greyhounds: The Past, Present and Future of Offender Registration

Flickr/Shankar S.

Elizabeth Reiner Platt

Contrary to popular belief, offender registries are not a recent phenomenon. Offender registries are government-controlled systems that track the movements and other activities of certain persons with criminal convictions. While today they are most commonly used for sex offenders, registries have been adopted
since the 1930s to regulate persons convicted of a wide variety of offenses including embezzlement, arson, and drug crimes. Early registries were widely criticized as ineffective and overly punitive, and many were eliminated through litigation or legislative repeals. Others simply fell into disuse over the course of the 20th century. Now, there is a growing body of research that demonstrates that
modern sex offender registries are similarly ineffective at reducing crime. Sex offender registries are costly, vastly overbroad, and error-ridden. Even worse, the overwhelming stigma of public notification provisions may actually increase recidivism among offenders.2 Despite their repeated history of failure, enthusiasm for publicly available, internet-based registries for every offense imaginable has only grown in recent years. There have been proposals across the country to register those found guilty of animal abuse, arson, drug offenses, domestic violence, and even failure to pay child support. Existing registries are
expanding and becoming increasingly punitive. Without a concerted effort to stop the tide of offender registration, we are at risk of repeating past mistakes on a much larger and more treacherous scale.

Offender registries are backwards, punitive measures that do not make communities safer. Unfortunately, those in favor of more nuanced, data-driven methods of reducing violence and sexual abuse face substantial barriers in overcoming precedent from years when registries were far narrower in scope than they are today. Advocates must work to distinguish current registries from their predecessors, educate legislators and the public on the ineffectiveness and perverse consequences of offender registries, and continue to conduct research to determine what actually works to prevent harm. While it is an uphill battle, we may take comfort that the facts are on our side.

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The School-to-Prison Pipeline Tragedy on Montana’s American Indian Reservations

The boundary of Rocky Boy’s Reservation in Montana. Flickr/Nomadic Lass

Melina Angelos Healey

American Indian  adolescents in Montana are caught in a school-to-prison pipeline. They are plagued with low academic achievement, high dropout, suspension and expulsion rates, and disproportionate contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems.  This phenomenon has been well documented in poor, minority communities throughout the country. But it has received little attention with respect to the American Indian population in Montana, for whom the problem is particularly acute. Indeed, the pipeline is uniquely disturbing for American Indian youth in Montana because this same population has been affected by another heartbreaking and related trend: alarming levels of adolescent suicides and self-harm.

The statistical evidence and tragic stories recounted in this report demonstrate beyond doubt that American Indian children on the reservations and elsewhere in Montana are moving into the school-to-prison pipeline at an alarming and tragic rate. The suicides of so many children is cause for despair, and the complicity of the education system in those deaths, whether through deliberate actions or through inattention, is cause for serious self-reflection and remediation. This article has been written in the hope that the people of Montana, government officials at all levels, teachers and school administrators, and public interest lawyers will have some of the information they need to take action. Despair, prison, and untimely death should not and need not be the ending places of public education for our most vulnerable children.

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Josh Zaharoff

About the Author
Josh Zaharoff is a 2012 graduate of NYU School of Law and a former staff editor on the Review of Law & Social Change. He graduated from Yale University in 2002, then spent several years doing non-profit work as an advocate for environmental and democracy reforms. After law school, he clerked for one year for Magistrate Judge Maria Valdez of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He currently works as an associate attorney at the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC) in Chicago.

Publication in RLSC
The Efficiency of Energy Efficiency: Improving Preemption of Local Energy Conservation Programs, 37 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 783 (2013).