By: Dan Ziebarth*
Published: December 21, 2021
Abstract
County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund was one of the most significant environmental law rulings in 2020. The case revolved around statutory interpretation of what is considered to be a point source and set new precedent for interpreting permitting requirements regarding the discharge of pollutants. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hawaii Wildlife Fund, determining the County of Maui had violated the Clean Water Act by not receiving permits for discharging pollutants into navigable waters. The dissenting Justices argued that the Court had erred interpreting the statute and instead presented arguments in favor of a textualist approach to interpreting environmental statutes. This article discusses the shortcomings of textualist interpretations of environmental law statutes. Instead, a purposivist approach should be applied to future statutory interpretation of environmental law cases, an approach which begins with thorough consideration of the ultimate aims of the law and the issue that statute was intended to address. Such an approach is preferred over a textualist approach in the context of environmental laws because environmental laws are usually passed to address or prevent a particular harm, so to ignore that intent detracts from environmental laws’ effectiveness.
*PhD Student, Department of Political Science, George Washington University; LLM Candidate, University of Sunderland. I owe many thanks to the Penn State Law Review Penn Statim staff for their hard work and insightful editorial assistance during the process of preparing this manuscript for publication.
Suggested Citation: Dan Ziebarth, Understanding Aims: Environmental Textualism and the Faulty Dissents in County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund, 126 Penn St. L. Rev. Penn Statim 34 (2021).