President Obama hailed Justice Stevens yesterday as “an impartial guardian of the law.” Sadly, that amounts to a bold claim in our polarized society, with our overly political view of the courts. But it is true, perhaps illustrated best by Justice Stevens’ rulings in environmental cases.
Justice Stevens came to the Court at the dawn of the environmental movement and at a heady time for environmentalists in the courts. Stevens’ predecessor, Justice William O. Douglas, had famously argued that mountains and trees should have standing and judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had developed a number of doctrines that allowed that court to aggressively second-guess agency decision-making to ensure that the agencies realized the broad and ambitious goals of environmental statutes.
Justice Stevens firmly rejected the idea that environmentalism was some sort of transcendental force that gave judges special powers to enforce broad statutory goals. Most famously, in Chevron v. NRDC, Justice Stevens’ wrote a majority opinion for the Court that sternly rebuked the D.C. Circuit for substituting its judgment for that of the Reagan EPA, which sought to give industry more flexibility in meeting their Clean Air Act obligations. While a bitter defeat for environmentalists, Chevron, which holds that judges must follow the law when clear and defer to agencies when they make a reasonable judgment about an ambiguous law, is rightly hailed today as a landmark of both administrative law and judicial restraint.
Those same principles – deference to the plain language of statutes and concern about judicial restraint – are the hallmarks of Justice Stevens’ two other landmark environment rulings: Tahoe Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and Massachusetts v. EPA. The Tahoe ruling, upholding land-use protections put in place to save Lake Tahoe, followed a 15-year period where the Court’s conservatives, led by Justice Scalia, had been remarkably inventive in trying to transform the Constitution’s Takings Clause into a barrier to environmental laws. Justice Stevens garnered a six-justice majority for a ruling that returned the Takings Clause to its intended role mainly in securing compensation for landowners when the government exercises its power of eminent domain.
In Massachusetts v. EPA, Justice Stevens relied Chevron and the unambiguously broad terms of the Clean Air Act in holding that EPA may regulate greenhouse gas pollution using its existing authority under the Act. This ruling has allowed the Obama Administration to aggressively combat global warming without waiting for further action by Congress.
Justice Stevens should be remembered as a great justice in environmental cases, but not because he bent the law to favor environmental outcomes, but rather because he insisted that the law itself be followed, which dictate an environmental outcome in many cases during his tenure. — Douglas Kendall