The Limits of Law
The Public Regulation of Private Pollution

An analysis of the development of US water pollution laws, showing how legal processes and social relations interact as the state struggles to reconcile contradictory responsibilities.

Peter Cleary Yeager (Author)

9780521365352, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 January 1991

384 pages, 6 b/w illus. 4 tables
23.7 x 16 x 2.4 cm, 0.73 kg

'The Limits of Law provides a well-researched, concise history of the evolution of attempts to reduce industrial pollution of US waterways from 1948 through to the 1980s.' Lettie McSpadden Wenner, American Journal of Sociology

This book examines the systematic constraints on US law enforcement agencies' efforts to regulate business behaviour. It looks specifically at the postwar development of laws regulating water pollution and at the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to enforce them. The discussion traces the factors leading to legal change and analyses the ways in which the impacts of environmental laws vary from their stated purposes and goals, even under relatively favourable conditions for their enforcement. It shows how legal processes and social relations mutually constrain and shape one another as the state struggles to manage often contradictory responsibilities, in this case to encourage both economic growth and environmental welfare.

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The social production of business offenses
2. Bringing the law back in: an integrated approach
3. The politics of water: pollution policies to 1970
4. Contradiction and change: environmental consciousness and the mobilization of law
5. Legislating clean water: changing conceptions of environmental rights
6. Controls and constraints: from law to regulation
7. Enforcement: the social production of environmental offenses
Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Environment law [LNKJ]