Pace Environmental Law Review Volume 22 Issue 1 Spring 2005 Article 3 April 2005 Thinking Outside the Box: Property Rights as a Key to Environmental Protection Robert H. Cutting Lawrence B. Cahoon Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/pelr Recommended Citation Robert H. Cutting and Lawrence B. Cahoon, Thinking Outside the Box: Property Rights as a Key to Environmental Protection, 22 Pace Envtl. L. Rev. 55 (2005) Available at: https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/pelr/vol22/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Law at DigitalCommons@Pace. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pace Environmental Law Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Pace. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Thinking Outside the Box: Property Rights as a Key to Environmental Protection ROBERT H. CUTTING and LAWRENCE B. CAHOON* Professor Oliver Houck wrote in Science that the promise of in- corporating objective science into environmental law and policy has been subverted by the political system. We offer a solution based on the property rights of receptors of pollutants, rather than the current focus on the rights of the "generators"of pollu- tion. Environmental law must require internalization of all costs to the generator,as demanded by market economics, which is difficult given the vast gaps in data (the Data Deficit). The burden should be placed on the generator to quantify and to demonstrate scientifically containment of all trans-boundary ef- fects. The present systems effectively subsidize polluters by per- mitting them to deposit waste into public and private property and to use the population as test subjects while unconstitution- ally taking their property rights.