by Chaim Mandelbaum FME Law Counsel Eminent domain, the process by which a government “takes” an individual’s land or property for “public use,” has long been abused. This is especially true today in Virginia. Too many landowners in the Commonwealth are facing an impossible to win situation when Cities and Counties come calling. Some localities in [...]
Click here to download a complete pdf version of E&E Legal Letters Issue III. Click on headlines for the full article. Bootleggers and Baptists . . . and Hucksterism by Dr. David Schnare, E&E Legal General Counsel Thirty-one years ago, Bruce Yandel coined the phrase “Bootleggers and Baptists” to describe how these strange bedfellows work [...]
By Chaim Mandelbaum FME Law Counsel Recent transparency efforts by The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) and the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (FME Law) ran head first into the anti-transparency culture and institutional wagon circling that seems to pervade state funded institutions of higher education these days. The University of Illinois at [...]
By Chaim Mandelbaum FME Law Counsel On March 8th 2012 the Constellation Energy Group agreed to a settlement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).[1] The $245 million dollar settlement was a huge win for FERC’s Office of Enforcement, which had opened the investigation into Constellation in January 2008, only to see it languish for [...]
By Chaim Mandelbaum FME Law Counsel On June 5, 2013, the first of a series of news stories appeared revealing the extent of the information leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Ultimately, this information exposed a massive effort on the part of the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect “metadata” about electronic communications such as [...]
by Chaim Mandelbaum Counsel, The Free Market Environmental Law Center In 1966, the federal government passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), in order to give people greater insight into the operations of the government, and to allow them oversight on how the government spends their money. States soon followed suit and passed their own [...]
