Allocating Pollution

Arden Rowell

Assistant Professor, Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Scholar, University of Illinois College of Law

Many thanks to Michael Abramowicz, Amitai Aviram, Eric Biber, Ralph Brubaker, Thomas Colby, Dan Cole, John Colombo, Dhammika Dharmapala, Kirsten Engel, Lee Fennell, David Fontana, Eric Freyfogle, Robert Glicksman, Shi-Ling Hsu, Bruce Huber, Heidi Hurd, Christine Hurt, David Hyman, Charles Imohiosen, Eric Johnson, Robin Juni, Richard Kaplan, Robin Kar, Patrick Keenan, Dan Kelly, Jay Kesan, Scott Kieff, William Kovacic, Robert Lawless, Michael Livermore, Tim Malloy, Jonathan Masur, Jud Mathews, Brian McCall, Emily Meazell, John Nagle, Jonathan Nash, Lee Paddock, Richard Pierce, Jeffrey Pojanowski, Dara Purvis, Andrew Reeves, Larry Ribstein, Richard Ross, J.B. Ruhl, Steven Schooner, Karen Bradshaw Schulz, Justin Sevier, Jamelle Sharpe, Nicola Sharpe, Paul Stancil, Suja Thomas, Robert Tuttle, Lesley Wexler, Jonathan Wiener and Verity Winship for their comments and suggestions. Thanks also to the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review, including Liz Austin, Brad Hubbard, and Matt Rozen, for outstanding editorial support.

Law can often be used to reduce or even eliminate the harm from pollution by manipulating “exposure allocation,” or how pollution is allocated across a target population. Opportunities for exposure allocation arise whenever the relationship between exposure to a pollutant and harm is nonlinear, as is the case for many pollutants. For these pollutants, exposure allocation presents the potential for reducing the harm from pollution even when it is not possible to reduce either the total amount of pollution emitted or the total amount of exposure. After identifying the conditions under which changing exposure allocations can improve health and save lives, this Article identifies legal strategies for managing exposure allocation to minimize the harm caused by pollution.

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