The Limits of Law: The Public Regulation of Private Pollution

by Peter Cleary Yeager

• ISBN13: 9780521448819
• ISBN10: 0521448816
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-08-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book examines the systematic constraints on US law enforcement agencies' efforts to regulate business behaviour. It looks specifically at the postwar development of laws regulating water pollution and at the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to enforce them. The discussion traces the factors leading to legal change and analyses the ways in which the impacts of environmental laws vary from their stated purposes and goals, even under relatively favourable conditions for their enforcement. It shows how legal processes and social relations mutually constrain and shape one another as the state struggles to manage often contradictory responsibilities, in this case to encourage both economic growth and environmental welfare.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. The social production of business offences

2. Bringing the law back in: an integrated approach

3. The politics of water: pollution policies to 1970

4. Contradiction and change: environmental consciousness and the mobilization of law

5. Legislating clean water: changing conceptions of environmental rights

6. Controls and constraints: from law to regulation

7. Enforcement: the social production of environmental offences

Conclusions.