This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 1st, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

New lawsuits hope to apply state-level nuisance regulation to

pollution that crosses not just state, but international borders. The challenges

come from cities in California, New York, and Colorado. Cato adjunct scholar Andrew Grossman is skeptical.

We spoke this week.

What is the best argument that pollution that crosses state lines and in fact international borders

constitutes a nuisance and a nuisance that can be regulated under state law.

So if you look at it superficially,

there is a long history of using state nuisance law,

which is a form of common law,

to address certain types of pollution.

For example, I think the typical example that people use would be say a concrete plant that

throws a lot of dust in the air, blankets the neighborhoods, it blankets the city,

and you might use nuisance law to enjoin the factory from doing that and perhaps even to pay damages

for the people whose property has been damaged.

This of course is a little bit different.

You're not talking about a single plant, you're not talking about a single group of people

who are subject to its emissions, and you're not talking about activity

that's happening within a well-defined space. In other words, you're getting well

outside of anything that the common law of nuisance had really ever considered.

So what have these cities done?

I know that there are several lawsuits pending against oil companies in California.

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