Sue, Settle, and Shut Out the States: Destroying the Environmental Benefits of Cooperative Federalism

In recent years, environmental advocacy groups have increasingly succeeded in using a faux litigation strategy to effectively trample the statutory regulatory framework and to shut out the states from important policy decisions. This policy-making process— called “sue-and-settle” or “suit-and-settlement”—not only violates the statutory framework, but also leads to haphazard policy making that should violate the standards of any serious policy analyst.