Introduction, Sypmosium Common Law Environmental Protection (original) (raw)

Many factors led to the growth of environmental regulation in the 1960s and 1970s, including the perceived failure of preexisting institutions to provide adequate levels of environmental protection.' In the decades following World War II, state governments began enacting broad regulatory schemes to control the environmental effects of private industrial activity. The federal government followed soon thereafter, erecting the basic architecture of contemporary federal environmental law. Beginning in 1969, Congress enacted a flurry of environmental statutes, including the National Environmental Policy Act, 2 the Clean Air Act, 3 the Clean Water Act, 4