This is my first effort at a blog and I am fascinated with the variety of subjects addressed and points taken by numerous blogs appearing on the American Bar Association site. I’m particularly interested in two fundamental necessities in our society: electricity and water. Hence laws dealing with electricity and laws dealing with potable water, as well as use of navigable waters of the United States have been an emphasis in my practice. Both are very topical, with pending or recently decided cases in many Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court dealing with environmental aspects of the use of fossil fuels for electric generation, and from Flint, Michigan, a plethora of matters involved with potable water in many geographic areas besides Flint. In the latter case, the hint is that local DEQ’s or health departments have somehow not fulfilled their duties to the public as far as water contaminants are concerned.
Clean Water is not a new issue and I wrote a law review article in 1972, Judicial Review of Administrative Agencies in Arkansas 25 Ark. I. Rev 397, when the EPA was first organized that dealt with administrative law and remedies in my home state that included creation of the state agency required by the EPA Act. At that time, the EPA was just beginning and the Great Lakes, among others, had pollution issues. Ironically, the savior for Flint was clean water that now comes from Lake Huron that has developed over the years through the oversight of EPA and other State and Local officials.
These complex areas can often pale to the difficulty of human expectations and needs of dying relatives. Often, probate proceedings can be as heart wrenching as divorce and child custody. I’ve even experienced the murder of a client in a domestic dispute to name just one difficult, if not impossible, matter for a civil lawyer to deal with. I look forward to talking more about this in subsequent blogs.