The Federal Clean Air Act of 1970 is widely seen as a revolutionary legal response to the failures of the earlier common law regime, which had governed air pollution in the United States for more than a century. Noga Morag-Levine challenges this view, highlighting striking continuities between the assumptions governing current air pollution regulation in the United States and the principles that had guided the earlier nuisance regime. Most importantly, this continuity is evident in the centrality of risk-based standards within contemporary American air pollution regulatory policy. Under the European approach, by contrast, the feasibility-based technology standard is the regulatory instrument of choice. Through historical analysis of the evolution of Anglo-American air pollution law and contemporary case studies of localized pollution disputes, Chasing the Wind argues for an overhaul in U.S. air pollution policy. This reform, following the European model, would forgo the unrealizable promise of complete, perfectly tailored protection--a hallmark of both nuisance law and the Clean Air Act--in favor of incremental, across-the-board pollution reductions. The author argues that prevailing critiques of technology standards as inefficient and undemocratic instruments of "command and control" fit with a longstanding pattern of American suspicion of civil law modeled interventions. This distrust, she concludes, has impeded the development of environmental regulation that would be less adversarial in process and more equitable in outcome.

Table of Contents:
Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii List of Abbreviations xv Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE Regulating Air Pollution: Risk-and Technology-Based Paradigms 9 A Rights Revolution? Risk and BAT in the Clean Air Act 13 The 1970 Clean Air Act: Regulatory Options 15 The 1970 Clean Air Act: Regulatory Implementation 17 Risk, Courts, and the EPA 22 Risk versus BAT: The Policy Debate 24 CHAPTER TWO "Command and Control": Means, Ends, and Democratic Regulation 27 Means, Ends, and Democratic Regulation 28 Means, Ends, and Lochner 30 Between Lochner and Industrial Union (the Benzene Case) 32 CHAPTER THREE Regulating "Noxious Vapours": From Aldred's Case to the Alkali Act 39 Sic Utere: Absolute Liability as a Separation Regime 40 Controlling Noxious Vapors from Copper and Alkali Works in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Technological and Evidentiary Barriers 47 Absolute Liability and "Trifling Inconvenience": The Road to the St. Helen's Regime 52 The Alkali Act Regime 56 CHAPTER FOUR On the "Police State" and the "Common LawState" 63 "Lochner Revisionism" and American Exceptionalism 64 The "Police State" and the "Common Law State" 67 Nuisance Law and Public Health Administration 71 Between Nuisance and Substantive Due Process 74 Administration, Delegation, and the Rule of Law 79 On the "Absolutism of a Democratic Majority" 82 CHAPTER FIVE From Richards's Appeal to Boomer: Judicial Responses to Air Pollution, 1869-1970 86 Richards's Appeal (1868): Injunction or Damages? 88 Huckenstine's Appeal (1872): Neither Injunction nor Damages 91 Pennsylvania Lead Company (1881) and Evans v. Reading Chemical Fertilizing Co.(1894): Injunctive Relief and Out-of-Place Industrial Facilities 92 Versailles Borough (1935) and Waschak v. Moffat (1954): "One Who Voluntarily Goes to War ..." 94 Sullivan v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Co.(1904): BAT Injunctions 98 CHAPTER SIX "Inspected Smoke": The Perpetual Mobilization Regime 103 English Antismoke Efforts Prior to 1880 105 Smoke in America: 1881-1948 109 Smoke Abatement and the Police Power 112 Perpetual Mobilization and Nuisance Per Se 115 Beyond Smoke 122 CHAPTER SEVEN "Odors," Nuisance, and the Clean Air Act 124 An Emergent Air-Pollution Regime: 1947-55 124 The Problem of "Odors" 128 Odors and Nuisance Law 130 "Odors" and the Road to the CAA 133 Odors and the EPA: 1970-92 135 CHAPTER EIGHT Regulating "Odors": The Case of Foundries 143 Foundries: Process, Pollution, and Control Technology 144 New Haven, Michigan 148 Berkeley, California 153 Tempe, Arizona 161 Skokie, Illinois 166 Evidentiary Burdens and Perpetual Mobilization 173 CHAPTER NINE Conclusion 179 Notes 189 Cases Cited 233 Selected Bibilography 235 Index 249