University of Houston Law Center Professor Victor Flatt is the Dwight Olds Chair in Law and co-director of the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Center.
Dec. 16, 2020 - University of Houston Law Center Professor Victor Flatt served as one of eight co-authors in a report published Tuesday that indicates that the EPA’s deregulation of water protection policies last this year was based on insubstantial scientific methodology. The report was released by the External Environmental Economics Advisory Committee.
“Our courts have spent years trying to determine what the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act is.,” said Flatt, the Dwight Olds Chair in Law and co-director of the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Center. “The attempt to define ‘waters of the United State’s by the Trump Administration was flawed because it made unsupported assumptions about state regulation.”
In 2019, the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency interpreted Clean Water Act jurisdiction with the “Navigable Waters Protection Rule” to Define Waters of the United States to shrink the amount of water that was covered by the law. The report asserts that the rulemakings assumption that states would take over regulation was not supported by evidence.
