Toward Understanding the Dynamics of Criminal Enforcement of Environmental Laws: Joseph Hilldorfer and Robert Dugoni, The Cyanide Canary

摘要

Environmental law has become a highly specialized field characterized by complex statutes and abstruse regulations. Many students find the subject dry, abstract, and difficult to master. The Cyanide Canary, a gripping chronicle of the first successful criminal prosecution of an individual for violating the knowing-endangerment provision of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, could go a long way toward helping them understand how environmental litigation really works, including the day-by-day task of building a case and the institutional relationships that can affect whether and how a case goes forward. The story of United States v. Elias has enough twists and turns to be the stuff of a mystery novel. Fortunately, the authors—one of the Environmental Protection Agency investigators who worked on the case and his collaborator, a lawyer-journalist who had no role in these events—structure the work in just that way. The book has fifty-six chapters averaging just over five pages in length, with each chapter headed only by date and location. There is no table of contents: the book starts with the dramatis personae and concludes with an epilogue, an afterword, and a where-are-they-now update on the characters. But The Cyanide Canary is more than a true-life crime saga. The book contains a detailed account of the investigation and litigation strategies that the federal government pursued. More than that, it offers important insights into the larger context within which environmental enforcement takes place. Those insights are especially accessible because they are not buried in dense theoretical prose but rather emerge from the authors' "show, don't tell" approach to their subject. At the same time, this engrossing tale suggests the limited utility of criminal sanctions in the quest for environmental quality, a matter to which the book refers only obliquely.