Scientists believe 2014 will likely be the warmest year on record; and now Christopher K. Warren, a third year law student at Boston College Law School and a former summer law intern with the Whistleblower Law Collaborative, has written a timely and excellent law review article: “Blowing the Whistle on Environmental Law_ How Congress Can Help“.
[SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article].
The Note will be published in Volume 42, Issue 1 of the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review and is also available online for download as a PDF.
Congress has a history of instituting whistleblower programs to protect and reward individuals who expose wrongdoing to the government, most notably the False Claims Act and more recently the Dodd-Frank Act.
In this article, Mr. Warren persuasively argues that the recent whistleblower programs instituted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Act should be used as models for an Environmental Protection Agency whistleblower program to expose environmental statutory violations and crimes.
The major environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act have been on the books for decades now, but the government needs the help of insiders to adequately address violations just as Congress decided in 1986 that the False Claims Act originally enacted during the Civil War needed to be modernized to address the growing problem of fraud against the government. The amended False Claims Act has been hugely successful resulting in the recovery of over $30 billion to the Treasury. The environmental crisis facing the United States and the world is even more daunting and we need all hands on deck. Let’s hope Congress will consider Mr. Warren’s idea.
