MOT. FOR LEAVE TO FILE AMICUS CURIAE BRIEF 1

Michelle A. Blackwell (OSB No. 002070)

Blackwell Law PC

1209 Pearl Street

Eugene, OR 97401

Tel: (541) 345-8800

mblackwell@blackwell.law

Attorney for Amicus Curiae John E. Davidson

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

DISTRICT OF OREGON

EUGENE DIVISION

KELSEY CASCADIA ROSE JULIANA; 

XIUHTEZCATL TONATIUH M., through 

his Guardian Tamara Roske-Martinez; et al.

Plaintiffs,

v.

The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA; 

BARACK OBAMA, in his official capacity as 

President of the United States; et al., 

Federal Defendants.

______________________________________

Case No.: 6:15-cv-01517-TC 

MOTION FOR LEAVE TO FILE AMICUS 

CURIAE BRIEF

Without Oral Argument

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MOT. FOR LEAVE TO FILE AMICUS CURIAE BRIEF 2

MOTION FOR LEAVE TO FILE AMICUS CURIAE BRIEF

Professor John E. Davidson respectfully requests permission to file the attached amicus

curiae brief in support of Plaintiffs in this case. Pursuant to Local Rule 7-1(a), the undersigned 

hereby certifies that a good faith effort was made to confer with counsel for Plaintiffs, Federal 

Defendants, and Intervenors on this motion. Plaintiffs consent to the motion and amicus curiae’s 

participation. Federal Defendants and Intervenors positions are unascertained. This Motion is 

supported by the points and authorities below and the records and files herein.

Federal district courts possess the inherent authority to accept amicus briefs. See, e.g., 

Hoptowit v. Ray, 682 F.2d 1237, 1260 (9th Cir. 1982), abrogated on other grounds by Sandin v. 

Conner, 515 U.S. 472 (1995); In re Bayshore Ford Truck Sales, Inc., 471 F.3d 1233, 149, n.34 

(11th Cir. 2006) (“[D]istrict courts possess the inherent authority to appoint ‘friends of the court’ 

to assist in their proceedings.”); Jin v. Ministry of State Security, 557 F. Supp. 2d 131, 136 (D. 

D.C. 2008) (“[D]istrict courts have inherent authority to appoint or deny amici which is derived 

from Rule 29 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.”); United States v. Davis, 180 F. 

Supp. 797, 800 (E.D. La. 2001) (noting that district courts have authority to permit the filing of 

amicus briefs). The role of amicus briefs is to assist the court “in cases of general public interest 

by making suggestions to the court, by providing supplementary assistance to existing counsel, 

and by insuring a complete and plenary presentation of difficult issues so that the court may 

reach a proper decision.” Newark Branch, N.A.A.C.P. v. Town of Harrison, N.J., 940 F. 2d 792, 

808 (3d Cir. 1991).

John Davidson has been researching the subject of intergenerational justice for over 

twenty-five years and it has been his primary field of study for the past fifteen years. He has 

focused on questions as to whether and how principles of intergenerational obligation are 

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MOT. FOR LEAVE TO FILE AMICUS CURIAE BRIEF 3

expressly and implicitly imbedded in the United States Constitution, and whether and how those 

principles should affect constitutional interpretation, government action, and the exercise of 

judicial review. In researching those questions, he has thoroughly examined historical records 

expressive of the intergenerational philosophies and principles prevalent among the framers, as 

well as the text of the Constitution itself, and other foundational documents.

When John Davidson became aware of this litigation, involving as it does constitutional 

claims brought on behalf of Posterity and minor children to prevent government action and 

inaction alleged to be causing irreversible harms to critical public interests, he determined that 

his perspective might be of assistance to the court as it attempts to evaluate such novel and 

significant claims. 

Proposed amicus curiae respectfully submit that an amicus brief is both necessary and 

helpful to this Court. John Davidson brings a perspective on the legal issues involved that is 

distinct from the Plaintiffs. The proffered brief reviews key constitutional issues, including the 

reserved powers doctrine, the intergenerational philosophy of the framers of the constitution, the 

constitutional protections for life, liberty, and property, and the constitutional rights of Posterity, 

or future generations. The legal issues in this case are of exceptional importance for this nation, 

for our federal courts, and for constitutional jurisprudence. Historical records and literature, as 

well as scholars’ insights on those documents, are frequently review by courts when considering 

important constitutional claims, or constitutional claims that present an issue of first impression. 

See, e.g., McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010). Considering John Davidson’s analysis of

the historical underpinnings of Plaintiffs’ constitutional and public trust claims and his thorough 

review and evaluation of the historical records and literature, this amicus brief will help this 

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Court in analyzing the important legal claims presented by this case. Accordingly, John 

Davidson requests leave to file the attached amicus curiae brief. 

DATED this 24th day of February, 2016.

Respectfully submitted,

s/ Michelle A. Blackwell

Michelle A. Blackwell (OSB No. 002070)

Blackwell Law PC

1209 Pearl Street

Eugene, OR 97401

Tel: (541) 345-8800

mblackwell@blackwell.law

Attorney for Amicus Curiae John E. 

Davidson

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AMIC86 CURIAE BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFFS i

0LFKHOOH$%ODFNZHOO (O6%) 

3HDUO St. 

Eugene, OR 9740 

Tel: 541-

(PDLO: mblackwell@blackwell.law

Attorney for AmicXV Curiae -RKQ'DYLGVRQ

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 

DISTRICT OF OREGON 

EUGENE DIVISION 

KELSEY CASCADIA ROSE JULIANA; 

XIUHTEZCATL TONATIUH M., through 

his Guardian Tamara Roske-Martinez; et al. 

Plaintiffs, 

v. 

The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA; 

BARACK OBAMA, in his official capacity as 

President of the United States; et al., 

Federal Defendants.

Case No.: 6:15-cv-01517-TC 

AMICI CURIAE BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF 

PLAINTIFFS

________________________________________ 

Case 6:15-cv-01517-TC Document Filed Page 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS ii

TABLE OF AUTHORITIES iii

I. IDENTITY AND INTEREST OF AMICUS CURIAE 1

II. SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT 2

III. ARGUMENT 3

a. The Reserved Powers Doctrine 3

i. Rule against Legislative Entrenchment 3

ii. Public Trust Doctrine as an Aspect of the RPD 6

iii. Application of Reserved Powers to Federal Government 7

b. Intergenerational Philosophy of Framers and Predecessors 8

i. John Locke 8

ii. Founders’ Pervasive Concern for Future Generations 16

iii. Natural Resources in the Framers’ Philosophy 20

c. Unalienable (Intergenerational) Rights to Life, Liberty, Property 26

d. Uniform Time Discount Rate Violates Intergenerational Justice 28

IV. CONCLUSION 29

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TABLE OF AUTHORITIES

Cases

Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87, 135 (1810). .................................................................................. 4-5

Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, 146 U.S. 387 (1892). .............................................. 2, 6-7

Newton v. Commissioners of Mahoning County, 100 U.S. 548 (1879........................................ 5-6

Reichelderfer v. Quinn, 287 U.S. 315, 318 (1932). ........................................................................8

Stone v. Mississippi, 101 U.S. 814, 817-20 (1879) ........................................................................5

United States v. Winstar Corp., 518 U.S. 839, 888 (1996). ...........................................................8

Constitutional Provisions

Haw. Const. art. IX, § 1.................................................................................................................25

Ill. Const. art XI, § 1. ...................................................................................................................25

Mont. Const. art. IX, § 1................................................................................................................25

Pa. Const. art. I, § 27 .....................................................................................................................25

U.S. Const., Am. V........................................................................................ 2-3, 12, 13, 26, 27, 28

U.S. Const., Am. XIV.................................................................................................................. 2-3

U.S. Const. Art. I, Sec. 9, 10, ........................................................................................................18

U.S. Const. pmbl. ....................................................................................................................27, 29

Statutes

National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, § 101(b)(1), 42 U.S.C. § 4331(b)(1) (1970) .........25

Virginia’s 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom...............................................................................4

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Other Authorities

2 Blackstone, Commentaries.........................................................................................3, 12, 23, 25

8th Thesis, in Kant’s Political Writings 50 (H Reiss ed., H.B. Nisbet trans. 1970). .....................19

A.E. Dick Howard, Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia (1974). ...............................27

Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: the Great Collaboration (Alfred A. Knopf 1950). ........9

Agrippa [James Winthrop] X Mass Gazette (Boston) Jan. 1, 1788 ..............................................19

Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America

(1991). ..........................................................................................................................................9

Alexander Hamilton, New York Convention, (June 1788) ..........................................................19

Annette Baier, For the Sake of Future Generations in Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in 

Environmental Ethics (Tom Regan ed. 1984) ...........................................................................19

Argument of the United States, Fur Seal Arbitration (U.S. v. Gr. Brit. 1893), reprinted in 9 Fur 

Seal Arbitration: Proceedings of the Tribunal of Arbitration (Gov’t Printing Office 1895), also 

reprinted in 1 John Bassett Moore, History and Digest of the International Arbitrations to 

Which the United States Has Been A Party 755, 813-14 (1898). .............................................25

Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas

(1942) ...........................................................................................................................................9

Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation, chap. 5, esp. 161-64. (Baltimore, 

1988). .........................................................................................................................................21

Cicero, Letters to Atticus ................................................................................................................3

Clark Wolf, Contemporary Property Rights, Lockean Provisos, and the Interests of Future 

Generations, 105 Ethics 791-818 (1995). .............................................................................9, 14

Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (1952) .........................................................................9

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David A. Weisbach & Cass R. Sunstein, Climate Change and Discounting the Future: A Guide 

for the Perplexed, Reg-Markets Center Working Paper No. 08-19, Harvard Public Law 

Working Paper No. 08-20; Harvard Law School Program on Risk Regulation Research Paper

No. 08-12, at 11 (Aug. 12, 2008) ...............................................................................................29

David Dana & Susan Koniak, Bargaining in the Shadow of Democracy, 148 U. Pa. L. Rev. 473 

(1999) ...........................................................................................................................................4

David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of 

Morals 535 (Selby et al. eds. 1777). ..........................................................................................19

David N. Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (1994) .................................21

David Ramsey, Columbian Herald, Charleston, South Carolina, June 5, 1788 ...........................19

Douglas Grant, Underpinnings of the Public Trust Doctrine: Lessons from Illinois Central

Railroad, 33 Ariz. St. L.J. 849 (2001) .........................................................................................7

Duncan, Property as a Public Conversation, Not a Lockean Soliloquy: A Role for Intellectual 

and Legal History in Takings Analysis, 26 Envtl. L. 1095, 1122 (1996) ..................................15

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Dolphin ed. 1961). ............................20

Elliot, Future Generations, Locke’s Proviso and Libertarian Justice, 3 J. Applied Philosophy 

217 (1986) ..................................................................................................................................15

English Bill of Rights ....................................................................................................................17

Eric A. Posner & Adrian Vermeule, Legislative Entrenchment: A Reappraisal, 111 Yale L.J. 

1665 (2002). .................................................................................................................................3

Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (1985) ..9

Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622) ..............................................3

George Mason to George Washington, April 2, 1776, The Papers of George Mason 1:435 ......18

H. Commager, “America in Its Third Century – What Prospects?” (address before the National

Town Meeting at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.,

March 17, 1976) ........................................................................................................................17

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Herbert Sloan, Principles and Interest, 60. ............................................................................22, 25

Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History (1784) ..................................................................19

James Wilson, Opening address to the Pennsylvania ratifying convention (Nov. 24, 1787) .......19

Jim Gardner, Discrimination Against Future Generations: The Possibility of Constitutional 

Limitation, 9 Envtl. L. 29 (1978)................................................................................................17

John C. Roberts & Erwin Chemerinsky, Entrenchment of Ordinary Legislation: A Reply to 

Professors Posner and Vermeule, 91 Calif. L. Rev. 1773 (2003). ..........................................3, 7

John Locke, First Treatise ............................................................................................................12

John Locke, Second Treatise .......................................................................................10, 11, 15, 23

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) (Peter Laslett ed., 2d ed. 1967) .....................10

John Sanders, Justice and the Initial Acquisition of Property, 10 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 390-91 

(1987). ........................................................................................................................................14

Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson 56-65 (Random House, New 

York 1998) ...........................................................................................................................22, 28

Julian Eule, Temporal Limits on the Legislative Mandate: Entrenchment and Retroactivity, 

12(2/3) Am. B. Found. Res. J. 379 (1987) ..................................................................................4

Kathleen M. Squadrito, Locke’s View of Dominion, 1 Envtl. Ethics 255, 259 (1979) .................11

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Richard Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Boyd.................................9

Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (1867) .................................................................13

Lev. 26:14, 32, 35 .........................................................................................................................10

M. Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787.......................................................18

Magna Carta .................................................................................................................................17

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Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York 1970) ......9

Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Sovereignty of the Living Generation,’ 52 Virginia 

Quarterly Review 437-44 (1976) ...............................................................................................21

Michael J. Klarman, Majoritarian Judicial Review: The Entrenchment Problem, 85 Geo. L. J. 

491 (1997) ....................................................................................................................................4

Nathaniel Barrell to George Thatcher, Boston (January 15, 1788) ..............................................19

Psalms 115:16................................................................................................................................10

Restatement (2d.) of the Law of Property § 12.1 (1) (1977) ........................................................11

Scott D. Gerber, To Secure These Rights: The Declaration of Independence and Constitutional 

Interpretation (1995) .............................................................................................................9, 11

Sir Robert Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law, Delivered at the University of 

Oxford, 1767-1773, 2:85, 2 vols. (Thomas M. Curley ed., Madison, Wis., 1986). ...................23

South Carolina’s Ratification Proclamation (May 23, 1788) in Bailyn .......................................27

Squadrito, Locke’s View of Dominion ...........................................................................................15

Sutton, Revolution to Secession: Constitution Making in the Old Dominion (1987)....................27

The Federalist No. 10 (James Madison) ................................................................................. 29-30

The Papers of George Mason (Robert A. Rutland ed. 1970) .......................................................18

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789, in Boyd XV........................4, 21, 22, 24

Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, Monticello, June 24, 1813, The Writings of Thomas 

Jefferson vol. XIII, 269-270 ................................................................................................23, 24

Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, April 11, 1787, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson.....................24

Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Earle , September 24, 1823 ......................................................22, 24

Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace .................................................................................................24

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Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, query XIII ........................................................................18

Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice....................................................................................................25

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Jan.1776 (Dover Publications, New York: 1997) .....................18

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791) in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Eric Foner ed., 

New York 1995). .......................................................................................................................20

U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) ..................................................................12, 17, 27, 28

U.S. Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon, “Technical Support Document: 

Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order 12866” 

(2010) .........................................................................................................................................29

Virginia Declaration of Rights ..........................................................................................12, 26, 27

W. Hamilton Bryson, The Use of Roman Law in Virginia Courts, 28 Am. J. Legal Hist. 135-46

(1984) .........................................................................................................................................22

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I. Identity and Interest of Amicus

John Davidson has been researching the subject of intergenerational justice (the 

ethicaland legal rights and responsibilities that exist between earlier and later generations within 

a political society) for over twenty-five years. It has been his primary field of study for the past 

fifteen years. He has focused especially on questions as to whether and how principles of 

intergenerational obligation are expressly and implicitly imbedded in the United States 

Constitution, and whether and how those principles should affect constitutional interpretation, 

government action, and the exercise of judicial review. In researching those questions, he has

thoroughly examined historical records expressive of the intergenerational philosophies and 

principles prevalent among the framers, as well as the text of the Constitution itself, and other 

foundational documents.

Professor Davidson received his J.D. from the University of Oregon School of Law in 

1992. After graduation from law school, he operated a small private practice and clerked for the 

Oregon Court of Appeals. For the past 14 years, he has served as a Professor and Instructor in 

the Political Science department of the University of Oregon, where he teaches courses on the 

subjects of constitutional law and intergenerational justice. 

When Professor Davidson became aware of this litigation, involving as it does 

constitutional claims brought on behalf of Posterity and minor children to prevent government 

action and inaction alleged to be causing irreversible harms to critical public interests, he 

determined that his perspective might be of assistance to the court as it attempts to evaluate such 

novel and significant claims. 

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II. Summary of Argument

The Reserved Powers Doctrine, consistently recognized by the courts since this nation’s 

inception, holds that one legislature may not legitimately infringe upon the equal sovereignty of 

later legislatures. The Illinois Central case established that certain critical natural resources are 

so essential to the long term wellbeing of the public that they must be treated as aspects of 

government, subject to reserved powers of later legislatures and the later publics that those 

legislatures represent. This principle prohibits earlier legislatures and agencies from pursuing 

policies that infringe on the equal interests of later generations in such critical resources. At the 

state level, this special application of the Reserved Powers Doctrine in the natural resource 

context now goes by the name of the Public Trust Doctrine. The Reserved Powers Doctrine is 

logically applicable to the federal government, and both the Supreme Court and government 

attorneys have recognized such application. Presumably, then, a natural resource aspect of the 

Reserved Powers Doctrine, analogous to the Public Trust Doctrine, also applies to the federal 

government

The principles of generational sovereignty and resource preservation that underlie the 

Reserved Powers Doctrine were a fundamental part of the political philosophy of this nation’s 

founders and framers. John Locke discussed the principles in great detail, as did Jefferson and 

others of the founders. The rights to “life, liberty and property” were premised on a set of 

intergenerational duties, the most important being preservation of the human species. They 

would later be understood as “unalienable” rights, which, to the founders was understood as a 

shorthand for rights “of which, . . . [one generation] cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest 

their posterity.” These rights were eventually incorporated into the Fifth and Fourteenth 

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Amendments due process clauses, and therefore lie at the core of “substantive due process” 

doctrine.

The uniform discount rate currently applied by Defendant agencies, which treats future 

lives and deaths as having a fraction of the value of current lives and deaths, violates the rights to 

life, equal protection and due process that the framers intended to apply to both “ourselves and 

our Posterity.”

III. Argument

A. The Reserved Powers Doctrine

The ancient principle known modernly as the “reserved powers” doctrine recognizes that 

one legislature may not legitimately infringe upon the equal sovereignty of later legislatures.

1. Future Legislatures and the Rule Against Legislative Entrenchment

One of the longest recognized applications of the reserved powers doctrine is the rule 

against legislative entrenchment: one legislature cannot bind a later legislature by enacting an 

irrepealable law. This rule is as close to an axiomatic principle of government as is known to 

jurisprudence,1 having been endorsed by (among others) Cicero,2 Bacon,3 and Blackstone4 before 

its adoption within American law and jurisprudence.

1 For an extensive discussion of this traditional rule, see John C. Roberts & Erwin Chemerinsky, 

Entrenchment of Ordinary Legislation: A Reply to Professors Posner and Vermeule, 91 Calif. L. 

Rev. 1773 (2003). For a rare dissenting position, see Eric A. Posner & Adrian Vermeule, 

Legislative Entrenchment: A Reappraisal, 111 Yale L.J. 1665, 1666 (2002).

2 Cicero, Letters to Atticus (“When you repeal the law itself, you at the same time repeal the 

prohibitory clause which guards against such repeal.”).

3 Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622) (“One Parliament may not 

by a precedent act . . . bind or frustrate a future [Parliament].”).

4 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769) (“The legislature, being in 

truth the sovereign power, is always of equal, always of absolute authority: it acknowledges no 

superior upon earth, which the prior legislature must have been if its ordinances could bind a 

subsequent parliament.”).

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Although the principle is often expressed in terms of the inherent powers of a legislature 

or a parliament, the rule also vindicates a more general notion of generational sovereignty. Each 

sitting legislature derives its legitimate authority from the particular public that elects it.

Recognizing the rights and powers of later legislatures is a way of recognizing the rights and 

powers of Posterity—the later incarnations of the citizenry who elect those later legislatures.5 As 

Thomas Jefferson once famously reminded James Madison, “between society and society, or 

generation and generation, there is . . . no umpire but the law of nature. . . . one generation is to 

another as one independent nation to another.”

6

The reserved powers of later generations, and the companion rule against legislative 

entrenchment, have been recognized in the United States since the nation’s inception. A typical 

example is Virginia’s 1786 Statute for Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson, which 

provides: “This assembly elected by the people for the purposes of normal legislation only, [has] 

no power to restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own 

. . . . Therefore to declare this act to be irrevocable would be of no effect in law.”

As early as 1810, in Fletcher v. Peck, the Supreme Court recognized “[t]he principle . . . 

that one legislature is competent to repeal any act which a former legislature was competent to 

pass; and that one legislature cannot abridge the powers of a succeeding legislature. The 

5 See Julian Eule, Temporal Limits on the Legislative Mandate: Entrenchment and Retroactivity, 

12(2/3) Am. B. Found. Res. J. 379 (1987) (the rule is an instance of the principle that an agent’s 

powers may not exceed the legitimate powers of the principal); Michael J. Klarman, 

Majoritarian Judicial Review: The Entrenchment Problem, 85 Geo. L. J. 491, 491-92 (1997) 

(today’s majority can control the present, but not the future); David Dana & Susan Koniak, 

Bargaining in the Shadow of Democracy, 148 U. Pa. L. Rev. 473, 533 (1999) (“If majority rule 

means anything, it means rule by the current majority and not by a majority of the past. That is 

the point of elections.”).

6 Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (Sept. 6, 1789).

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correctness of this principle, so far as respects general legislation, can never be controverted.” 10 

U.S. 87, 135 (1810).

Subsequently, the Supreme Court confirmed that contracts dealing with core 

governmental powers would be treated as voidable and repealable under traditional reserved 

powers principles. In Stone v. Mississippi, for instance, the Supreme Court upheld a state 

legislature’s criminalization of lotteries in the face of an earlier legislature’s grant of private 

lottery franchises: 

[T]he legislature cannot bargain away the police power of a State. Irrevocable grants of

property and franchises may be made if they do not impair the supreme authority to make

laws for the right government of the State; but no legislature can curtail the power of its

successors to make such laws as they may deem proper in matters of police. . . . No

legislature can bargain away the public health or the public morals. . . . The supervision

of both these subjects of governmental power is continuing in its nature. . . . [T]he power

of governing is a trust committed by the people to the government, no part of which can

be granted away.

101S. 814, 817-20 (1879) (quotations omitted).

In Newton v. Commissioners of Mahoning County, 100 U.S. 548 (1879), the Court had 

cause to further elaborate on this principle. The Court sustained the Ohio legislature’s statutory 

relocation of a county seat over objections that the prior statutory assignment of the seat to a 

different town was perpetual. Id. The Court explained that the contracts exception to the 

reserved powers doctrine (articulated in Fletcher) was inapplicable when “the statute in question 

is a public law relating to a public subject within the domain of the general legislative power of 

the State, and involving the public rights and public welfare of the entire community affected by 

it.” Id. at 557.

In all these cases, there can be no contract and no irrepealable law, because they 

are ‘governmental subjects,’ and hence within the category before stated. They 

involve public interests, and legislative acts concerning them are necessarily 

public laws. Every succeeding legislature possesses the same jurisdiction and 

power with respect to them as its predecessors. The latter have the same power of 

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repeal and modification which the former had of enactment, neither more nor less. 

All occupy, in this respect, a footing of perfect equality. This must necessarily be 

so in the nature of things. It is vital to the public welfare that each one should be 

able at all times to do whatever the varying circumstances and present exigencies 

touching the subject involved may require. A different result would be fraught 

with evil.

Id. at 559.

2. The Public Trust Doctrine as an Aspect of the Reserved Powers Doctrine

In Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois, the Supreme Court indicated that the 

management of critical natural resources was sufficiently governmental that, pursuant to the 

reserved powers doctrine, control of such resources could not be wholly privatized so as to 

impair the sovereignty of later legislatures and generations. 146 U.S. 387 (1892). At issue were 

submerged lands beneath the Chicago harbor, which the Illinois legislature had purportedly 

granted to the Illinois Central Railroad. The first portion of the Court’s opinion outlined the 

history of the Public Trust Doctrine as it had historically been applied to government interests in 

water and submerged lands, while outlining a theory of sovereign resources that extended 

beyond a narrow concern with such lands.

The state can no more abdicate its trust over property in which the whole people 

are interested, like navigable waters and soils under them, so as to leave them 

entirely under the use and control of private parties. . . than it can abdicate its 

police powers in the administration of government and the preservation of the 

peace. . . Any grant of the kind is necessarily revocable, and the exercise of the 

trust by which the property was held by the state can be resumed at any time. . .

The trust with which they are held, therefore, is governmental, and cannot be 

alienated . . . .

Ill. Cent. R.R., 146 U.S. at 453-55 (emphases added).

The Supreme Court grounded the latter portion of its Illinois Central opinion directly in 

the reserved powers analysis of Newton v. Commissioners:

In Newton v. Commissioners, . . . [the Court held] that there could be no contract 

and no irrepealable law upon governmental subjects, observing that legislative 

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acts concerning public interests are necessarily public laws; that every succeeding 

legislature possesses the same jurisdiction and power as its predecessor; that the 

latter have the same power of repeal and modification which the former had of 

enactment,-neither more nor less; that all occupy in this respect a footing of 

perfect equality; that this is necessarily so, in the nature of things; that it is vital to 

the public welfare that each one should be able at all times to do whatever the 

varying circumstances and present exigencies attending the subject may require; 

and that a different result would be fraught with evil. . . . As counsel observe, if 

this is true doctrine as to the location of a county seat, it is apparent that it must 

apply with greater force to the control of the soils and beds of navigable waters in 

the great public harbors held by the people in trust for their common use and of 

common right, as an incident to their sovereignty. The legislature could not give 

away nor sell the discretion of its successors in respect to matters, the government 

of which, from the very nature of things, must vary with varying circumstances. . . 

. Every legislature must, at the time of its existence, exercise the power of the 

state in the execution of the trust devolved upon it.

Id. at 459-60.

It is significant that Illinois Central did not just reject formal, de jure legislative 

entrenchment. The earlier Illinois legislature had not expressly forbidden later legislatures from 

acting in the areas of land use or water management. But the legislative grant at issue had the 

practical effect or restricting later legislatures’ equal freedom to provide equivalent opportunities 

and protections to the public that they would represent, by materially foreclosing certain options.

These cases reflect the principle that the de facto destruction of a resource or opportunity offends 

reserved powers principles as much as, or more than, the formal legislative entrenchment of a 

policy provision.

3. Application of the Reserved Powers Doctrine to the Federal Government

Logic and precedent suggest the reserved powers doctrine applies to the federal 

government as much as to state governments.7 Each iteration of Congress, just like each

7 See Douglas Grant, Underpinnings of the Public Trust Doctrine: Lessons from Illinois Central 

Railroad, 33 Ariz. St. L.J. 849, 877 (2001) (“[T]here is no reason why the reserved powers 

doctrine, with its inalienability principle, should not apply at the federal level as well as the state 

level.”); Roberts & Chemerinsky, supra note 1, at 1795-1801.

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iteration of a state legislature, is entitled to exercise the same powers as its predecessors, and to 

be protected from having those powers encroached upon by an earlier legislature’s enactments 

and policies. The Supreme Court recognized as much in Reichelderfer v. Quinn: “The will of a 

particular Congress ... does not impose itself upon those to follow in succeeding years.” 287 U.S. 

315, 318 (1932). More recently, in its briefs for United States v. Winstar Corp., the federal 

government acknowledged: “[t]he logic of the [reserved powers] doctrine ... applies equally to 

contracts alleged to have been made by the federal government.” 518 U.S. 839, 888 (1996).

There is no obvious reason why the environmental aspect of the reserved powers 

doctrine—the requirement that government respect the equal rights of future legislatures and 

generations to manage and benefit from sovereign resources over time—would not apply to the 

federal government. While some resources are of primarily local significance, and therefore 

primarily matters of state trust responsibility, other resources have interstate or international 

significance and would therefore seem to entail corollary federal rights and responsibilities.

Although the current Court has suggested that the Public Trust Doctrine is purely a matter of 

state law, it has never been called upon to determine whether a parallel, natural resource aspect 

of the Reserved Powers Doctrine applies at the federal level.

B. Intergenerational Philosophy of the Framers and Their Predecessors

1. John Locke

The reserved powers doctrine is just one aspect of a much broader set of intergenerational 

justice principles recognized by the American founders and their ideological predecessors. In the 

late 16th and the 17th Centuries, English rights theorists such as Algernon Sidney and John Locke 

elaborated and refined traditions of intergenerational rights and responsibilities inherited from 

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the ancient Greeks and Romans. After their deaths, their theories exerted a profound influence 

upon America’s founders.8

The tremendous influence of John Locke’s thought on the early American republic has 

been amply documented, and I will not reiterate that scholarship here.9 But at least one aspect of 

Locke’s influence deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. Locke’s theories of 

intergenerational obligation and stewardship, which lie at the heart of his political philosophy, 

have received far too little attention from the legal community.10 By contrast, those same ideas 

were intimately familiar to America’s founders.11 Locke’s views are essential components to a 

full understanding of the founders’ ideas of intergenerational justice, and how those views might 

apply to modern issues.

8

See Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas 

(Random House 1942) 75 (noting that among revolutionary leaders “the political writings of 

Locke, Sidney, and Milton are frequently mentioned with respect and reverence”). Letter from 

Thomas Jefferson to Richard Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Boyd 16: 118-19 (Jefferson said of the 

Declaration of Independence: “All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the 

day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, in printed essays, or in the elementary books 

of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”). See also Alan Craig Houston, 

Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton Univ. Press, 

Princeton, NJ: 1991).

9

See Scott D. Gerber, To Secure These Rights: The Declaration of Independence and 

Constitutional Interpretation 27-29 (New York University Press, New York & London 1995) 

(detailing Locke’s influence on Jefferson, James Otis, John and Samuel Adams, James Wilson 

and Alexander Hamilton); Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of 

the Constitution ix (Lawrence, Kansas 1985) (“that the central argument of the Declaration is 

based mainly upon John Locke’s Second Treatise is indisputable”); id. at 7 (noting Locke’s 

influence in the constitutional convention); Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (New 

York 1952) (esp. ch. 12); Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the 

History of Political Ideas 27 (Random House 1942) (“most Americans had absorbed Locke’s 

work as a kind of political gospel”).

10But see Clark Wolf, Contemporary Property Rights, Lockean Provisos, and the Interests of 

Future Generations, 105 Ethics 791-818 (1995).

11For a discussion of Locke’s influence on Jefferson’s generational philosophy, see Merrill D. 

Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography 383 (New York 1970); Adrienne 

Koch, Jefferson and Madison: the Great Collaboration 65, 76, 78 (New York, Alfred A Knopf 

1950).

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John Locke’s system of intergenerational ethics can be summarized in the form of five 

primary mandates: 1) We must preserve the human species; 2) We must treat the earth as though 

we were tenants, rather than owners; 3) We must not waste or destroy creation; 4) We must leave 

behind “enough and as good” for others; and 5) We must honor and preserve to the extent 

possible each generation’s right to make its own political choices. 

Preservation of the Human Species

At the heart of Locke’s system of intergenerational ethics is a concern for preservation of 

the human species. That is the primary and fundamental law, which is the standard and measure

of all the other natural laws.12 Of course, the principle has many more direct applications today 

than it did in Locke’s time. In the 17th century, it would have been difficult to conceive of any 

action or set of actions which could entirely eliminate humanity. Today we can imagine such 

scenarios all too easily.

Acting as Tenants

Locke adhered to the biblical notion that the earth exists for humankind as a sort of 

intergenerational commons. He cites King David for the proposition that “God gave the world to 

Adam and his posterity in common.”

13 This notion fixes all real property interests as varying 

species of tenancy or trust. One of a tenant’s chief obligations is to maintain property in as good 

12 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government ¶¶ 7, 16, 134, 135, 149, 159, 171, 183 (1689) (Peter 

Laslett ed., 2d ed. 1967).

13Locke, Second Treatise, ¶ 25 (citing Psalms 115:16) and ¶ 34. See also Lev. 26:14, 32, 35 

(“The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my 

tenants.”).

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and useful a condition as originally received.14 Accordingly each generation, as tenant, is 

expected to steward the earth for both the landlord (God) and later tenant-generations. Scott 

Gerber paraphrases Locke aptly: “Every individual is acting as a trustee of his Creator’s 

property, with the purpose of the trust being the preservation of mankind.”

15 The use of the 

landlord-tenant analogy to describe intergenerational relations was anything but new by Locke’s 

time. The metaphor was destined to become standard fare among the founders and their 

contemporaries.

Eschewing Spoilage, Waste, and Destruction

A natural corollary to the “world as commons” idea is Locke’s absolute prohibition 

against waste and destruction. If all our possessions are but temporary gifts from the Creator, 

then we obviously have an obligation to exercise due care in our custody of those possessions.

“Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.”

16

Locke applies this prohibition in various ways. For instance, an individual in the state of 

nature who claimed a property interest in particular fruits of nature was bound to use or consume 

the claimed fruits before they spoiled, “else he took more than his share and robbed others.”

17

While this prohibition of waste or spoilage could be understood simplistically as no more than a 

mandate for resource development,18 there is more to it than that. In paragraph 6 of the Second 

14See, e.g., Restatement (2d.) of the Law of Property § 12.1 (1) (1977) (Tenants have the right to 

reasonable use of property, but must return it in good condition).

15Gerber, supra note 10, at 45.

16Id. at ¶ 31; see also Kathleen M. Squadrito, Locke’s View of Dominion, 1 Envtl. Ethics 255, 

259 (1979) (“The view of dominion that Locke adopts in Some Thoughts Concerning Education

is one of responsible stewardship, an interpretation of Genesis that stresses man’s duties and 

obligations towards all creation. . . To spoil or waste any part of God’s creation is a sin.”).

17Locke, Second Treatise at ¶ 46.

18See id. at ¶ 34 (“God gave the world to men in common; but . . . it cannot be supposed He 

meant it should always remain common and uncultivated”) and ¶ 42 (“Land which is wholly left 

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Treatise, Locke identifies preservation as an affirmative value to be weighed alongside other 

values and property interests:

“. . .[T]hough [the state of nature] be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of 

license; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his 

person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any 

creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation 

calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges 

every one. . .”

19

Locke demands that an appropriate balance be struck between legitimate preservation 

interests and legitimate development interests. A failure to strike the appropriate balance 

constitutes “destruction, spoilage, and waste.”

20

In that same paragraph 6, Locke makes his famous assertion that “Reason . . . teaches all 

mankind who will but consult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm 

another in his life, health, liberty, or possession.” This passage is one of the primary sources for 

the “life, liberty, property” formulation that appears in various forms in the Virginia Declaration 

of Rights, the Declaration of Independence,21 and the Due Process clause of the Fifth 

to Nature, that hath no improvement of Pasturage, Tillage, or Planting is called, as indeed it is, 

waste. . .”

19Id. at ¶ 6 (emphasis supplied). See also Locke, First Treatise ¶¶ 50-56 (God does not permit us 

“to destroy those he has given us the Charge and Care of”; God requires us to preserve his 

creation).

20In contemplating which modern practices Locke might condemn as “waste,” it is helpful to 

consider the legal sense of “waste” which prevailed in pre-revolutionary England and which 

remains largely unchanged. Waste was defined by Blackstone as “a spoil or destruction in 

houses, gardens, trees, or other corporeal hereditaments, to the disheison of him that hath the 

remainder or reversion.” 2 Blackstone, Commentaries at 281. This legal doctrine of waste is 

addressed more towards the prevention of over- or mis-utilization of resources than towards 

prevention of underutilization. In so far as the waste doctrine concerns itself with the protection 

of successors’ interests, it readily lends itself to the analysis of intergenerational issues.

21“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed 

by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the 

Pursuit of Happiness.”

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Amendment,22 and it therefore warrants special attention. In Locke’s view, these inviolable 

personal liberties and property rights are, from their inception, subject to restraints against 

spoilage and destruction. In other words, while no individual ought to be wrongfully deprived of 

life, liberty, or possessions, those rights never extend so far as to include spoilage or destruction 

of the natural world, especially if that destruction could constitute a threat to preservation of the 

human species. This principle applies to governments as well as to individuals.

“[The legislative power] can be no more than those persons had in 

a state of nature before they entered into society. . . [and a person 

has] in the state of nature no arbitrary power over the life, liberty, 

or possession of another, but only so much as the law of nature 

gave him for the preservation of himself, and the rest of mankind.”

Id. at par. 135.

Any interpretation of Due Process rights based upon the founders’ original 

intent must take this philosophic background into account. 

Leaving enough behind

The above three principles imply a fourth: the “leave enough behind” rule, or “Locke’s 

Proviso.” According to this Proviso, an individual can legitimately create personal property 

interests in the bounties of nature only so long as “there is enough and as good left in common 

for others.”

23 Locke applied this rule to the appropriation of land, water, animals, and the fruits 

of the earth.24

22U.S. Const., Am. V (“No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due 

process of law . . ..”).

23Id. at ¶ 27 (emphasis supplied); see also 4 Letters and Other Writings of James Madison 478 

(property “embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right, and which 

leaves to every one else the like advantage”)(emphasis in original). 24Id. at ¶ 32; see also ¶ 33 (“Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, 

though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his 

thirst; and the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.”).

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The Proviso was probably articulated with intragenerational concerns in mind, more than 

intergenerational ones. Writing in the 17th century, Locke could not foresee how the overappropriation or overutilization of natural resources by one or more generations would prejudice 

later generations: he expressly noted that “there is land enough in the world to suffice double the 

inhabitants.”

25 Over the intervening centuries, however, the world’s population has doubled 

many times over, and Locke’s basic principles of just resource appropriation have implications 

today that were not readily apparent when he first formulated them.

Extending the Proviso’s coverage to include future generations gives due effect to the 

underlying principles of equity and affected interest upon which the Proviso is based.26 To 

require that a person appropriating property leave “enough and as good” for the earth’s future 

tenants as well as its present tenants is to honor Locke’s emphasis on the preservation of the 

species along with his view of the Earth as an intergenerational commons. Read in this way, the 

Proviso prohibits a variety of unsustainable practices – practices which result, individually or 

cumulatively, in the depletion or spoilage of natural resources, and which threaten the wellbeing 

of the human species. Because such practices do not leave “enough and as good” for later tenants 

of the intergenerational commons, the right to engage in such practices would be a right which 

could never be legitimately created or conveyed.

It is important to recognize that when Locke discussed the above four intergenerational 

principles, he did not limit their application to some semi-mythical “state of nature.” The rules 

25See id. at ¶ 36.

26See Clark Wolf, Contemporary Property Rights, Lockean Provisos, and the Interests of Future 

Generations, 105 Ethics 791, 799 (1995) (“The strongest argument in favor of the proviso is that 

it is necessary if initial appropriation is to avoid unjustifiably harming others. Since future 

generations are among those who might be harmed, justified initial appropriation must leave 

enough and as good for them as well”); John Sanders, Justice and the Initial Acquisition of 

Property, 10 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 390-91 (1987). 

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were held to be applicable to citizens living and working within political societies as well. The 

laws of a commonwealth, he maintained:

“[are] only so far right as they are founded on the law of nature, by which they are 

to be regulated and interpreted. . . . The rules that [legislators] make for other 

mens’ actions must . . . be conformable to the law of nature, i.e., to the will of 

God, of which that is a declaration . . . [t]he fundamental law of nature being the 

preservation of mankind . . . The end and measure of the [political] power is the 

preservation of all . . . society -- that is, all mankind in general.”

27

Taken together, Locke’s first four intergenerational mandates constitute an early, but 

remarkably clear articulation of what, today, would be termed a “sustainability” ethic.28

Generational Sovereignty

What political duties are owed by later generations to earlier generations? Put another 

way, what limits exist on an existing generation’s authority to make political decisions that are

binding upon later generations? Locke’s treatment of these questions constitutes the fifth major 

facet of his intergenerational philosophy. Because it is the most overtly political aspect of his

philosophy, it was of special interest to this nation’s founders.

27Locke, Second Treatise at ¶¶ 12, 135, 171; see also id. at ¶ 158 (the power of the legislature or 

commonwealth “being but the joint power of every member of the society . . . it can be no more 

than those persons had in a state of nature before they entered into society . . . for nobody can 

transfer to another more power than he has in himself”); id. at ¶ 136, n. 3, (quoting Hooker’s 

Ecclesiastical Polity, III, 9 to the effect that “laws human must be made according to the general 

laws of Nature . . . otherwise they are ill made.”)

28See e.g. Duncan, Property as a Public Conversation, Not a Lockean Soliloquy: A Role for 

Intellectual and Legal History in Takings Analysis, 26 Envtl. L. 1095, 1122 (1996) (recognizing 

Locke’s formulation of a “living within limits” ethic); Elliot, Future Generations, Locke’s 

Proviso and Libertarian Justice, 3 J. Applied Philosophy 217 (1986); Squadrito, Locke’s View of 

Dominion 262 (“Locke could not foresee the ecological crisis of the twentieth century. . . . 

However . . . [s]ince ecological balance is essential to the survival of God’s creation, and human 

beings are commanded by God to preserve their own species, it is clear that Locke would not 

endorse behavior that tends to disrupt the ecological balance of the Earth”).

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Locke emphasized the right of each generation to be master of its own political destiny.

He rejected the notion that parents or ancestors could oblige their descendants to pay allegiance 

to a particular government or form of government.

“[W]hatever Engagements or Promises any one has made for himself, he is under 

the Obligation of them, but cannot by any Compact whatsoever, bind his children 

or Posterity”.

Id. at par. 116.

Locke’s theory of generational sovereignty would later prove attractive to American 

colonists seeking to justify departure from their ancestors’ allegiance to the English crown.

To briefly recapitulate: Locke strongly influenced America’s founders with his 

intergenerational philosophy. That philosophy concerned the political rights which exist between 

generations, as well as intergenerational rights and responsibilities related to land and other 

natural resources.

2. The Founders’ Pervasive Concern for Future Generations

To what extent did the founders of the United States and the framers of the Constitution 

embrace these intergenerational philosophies? To what extent did the framers intend these 

traditions and ideas to inform the new government? 

The founders occupied a unique period in history, a recognizable cusp between one age and the 

next. Their exceptional circumstances required them on at least two occasions to closely examine

their relationship with prior and later generations. First, during the Revolution and the years 

leading up to it, they were compelled to explain, both to themselves and to the world as a whole, 

the circumstances which justified one generation’s separation from the government of its 

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ancestors.29 This was especially important, given that both the Magna Carta and the English Bill 

of Rights purported to bind not only those documents signatories, but their posterity as well. 

Next, subsequent to the Revolution, as the founders set out to frame new state 

constitutions and an even more ambitious “Novus Ordo Seclorum,”

30 their tasks again demanded 

that they contemplate the effects of their actions upon posterity. What considerations must they 

show to later generations? What duties could they reasonably hope to impose upon those same 

generations? To what extent might such considerations and duties be dependent upon one 

another? These themes are explored endlessly in documents of the period. The founders made it 

perfectly clear – in their speeches and correspondence, and in the language of the Constitution 

they wrought – that a legitimate government must equitably balance the interests of both earlier 

and later generations.31

During the difficult trials of the Revolution, the colonists’ concern for future generations 

strengthened their resolve. George Mason wrote to General Washington in April, 1776, “May 

God . . . be pleased to inspire us with spirit & resolution, to bear our present & future Sufferings, 

becoming Men determined to transmit to our Posterity, unimpair’d, the Blessings we have 

29See The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (“When . . . it becomes necessary for one 

people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . a decent 

respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them 

to the separation.”) 

30 “A New Order for the Ages,” United States national motto.

31 See Gardner, Discrimination Against Future Generations: The Possibility of Constitutional 

Limitation, 9 Envtl. L. 29, 35 (“A close examination of the debates of the Federal Convention of 

1787 reveals that the draftsmen of the Constitution invariably took the view that their generation 

had an obligation to protect the well-being of future generations”); H. Commager, “America in 

Its Third Century – What Prospects?” (address before the National Town Meeting at the John F. 

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., March 17, 1976) (Transcript on file 

at the Environmental Law office, The Lewis and Clark Law School) 7-8 (“[W]hat was 

uppermost in the minds of the founding fathers all the time [was a] sense of fiduciary obligation 

to posterity. Washington never stopped talking about it. Jefferson spoke of our descendants and 

thousands and thousands of generations. Tom Paine spoke about it, they all did.”)

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received from our Ancestors!”

32 In the revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, Thomas Paine 

suggested that, “In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in 

our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; and that eminence will present a 

prospect which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.”

33

Paine’s Common Sense also included a cogent, intergenerational challenge to the 

institution of hereditary monarchy. Because no one generation could rightfully presume to install 

a leader to rule a later generation, Paine argued, “monarchy is a degradation and lessening of 

ourselves, and hereditary succession . . . an insult and an imposition on posterity.”

34 These 

concerns were later reflected in the anti-nobility provisions of Article I, sections 9 and 10, of the 

Constitution.

During the Constitutional Convention, intergenerational concerns were reiterated 

frequently. Roger Sherman noted that, in drafting a constitution, the framers were “providing for 

our posterity, for our children and our grandchildren . . .”

35 Madison stressed that, “In framing a 

system which we wish to last for ages, we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will 

produce.”

36 George Mason, writing to his son at commencement of the convention, reflected:

“[T]o view, thro the calm sedate Medium of Reason, the Influence which the 

Establishments now proposed may have upon the Happiness or Misery of 

Millions yet unborn, is an Object of such Magnitude, as absorbs, & in a Manner 

suspends the Operations of human Understanding.”

37

32George Mason to George Washington, April 2, 1776, The Papers of George Mason 1:435 

33 Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January, 1776 (Dover Publications, New York: 1997) 22.

34 Id. 18. See Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, query XIII (praising Common Sense for 

introducing the idea of independence and a new form of government to the American colonies.) 

See also Ellis p. 58 (noting Common Sense “swept through the colonies like a firestorm.”)

35 M. Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, II:3.

36Id. at I:422

37The Papers of George Mason, ed. Robert A.Rutland (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1970) 3:892-3.

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Later, during the ratification debates, similar sentiments would find expression in the 

arguments of both federalists38 and antifederalists.39

Such generalized intergenerational concern accorded perfectly with the dominant moral 

philosophies of the time. David Hume stressed that future ills are “never the less real for being 

remote.”

40 Immanuel Kant maintained “human nature is such that it cannot be indifferent even to 

the most remote epoch which may eventually affect our species, so long as this epoch may be 

expected with certainty.”

41

One interesting way to gauge the prevalence of the intergenerational outlook during the 

late 18th century is to study the arguments put forth by commentators of the day on a prominent 

38See James Wilson’s opening address to the Pennsylvania ratifying convention (Nov. 24, 1787) 

(remarking that the effects of the constitution would extend “to innumerable States yet unformed, 

and to myriads of citizens who in future ages shall inhabit the vast uncultivated regions of the 

continent”); Alexander Hamilton, New York Convention, June, 1788 (seeking to deflect charges 

of corruption and self-dealing on the part of the drafters: “What reasonable man, for the 

precarious enjoyment of rank and power, would establish a system, which would reduce his 

nearest friends and his posterity to slavery and ruin?”); David Ramsey, Columbian Herald,

Charleston, South Carolina, June 5, 1788 (“To pull down one form of government without 

substituting something in its place that would answer the great ends for which men enter into 

society, would have been to trifle with posterity”).

39See Agrippa [James Winthrop] X Mass Gazette (Boston) Jan. 1, 1788 (opposing the proposed 

constitution due to the absence of a bill of rights, and warning: “By adopting the form proposed 

by the convention, you will have the derision of foreigners, internal misery, and the anathemas 

of posterity. By amending the present confederation, and granting limited powers to Congress, 

you secure the admiration of strangers, internal happiness, and the blessings and prosperity of all 

succeeding generations.)” (emphasis supplied). See also Nathaniel Barrell to George Thatcher, 

Boston (January 15, 1788) (“I see it pregnant with the fate of our libertys and if I should not live 

to feel its baneful effects, I see it entails wretchedness on my posterity”).

40David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles 

of Morals 535 (Selby et al. eds. 1777). 

41 Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History (1784), 8th Thesis, in Kant’s Political Writings 

50 (H Reiss ed., H.B. Nisbet trans. 1970). See Annette Baier, For the Sake of Future Generations 

in Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics 216-217 (Tom Regan ed., 

Philadelphia 1984) (“[T]o discern our duty to anybody, we must in a sense think of everybody, 

future persons included, according to Kant’s test. . . . Any practice like dumping toxic wastes 

where they will poison soil, air, or water, seems forbidden by Kant’s test – we cannot conceive 

of a system of nature in which all humans regularly do this, yet survive as a species.”).

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issue such as the French Revolution. Both the proponents and the detractors of that revolution 

chose to frame their arguments in terms of generational rights. In Reflections on the Revolution 

in France, Edmund Burke decried France’s departure from monarchy on generational 

entitlement grounds.42 In an eloquent passage, Burke describes society as a sacred partnership:

a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are 

living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each 

particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society.43

Later in the same piece, Burke phrased his concerns in the language of estate 

preservation, a language with strikingly modern environmental overtones:

[O]ne of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and

the laws are consecrated is [that] the temporary possessors and life-renters in it

[should be mindful] of what is due to their posterity . . . [and] should not think it

among their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance by

destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of society, hazarding to leave

to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation . . ..44

Paine penned his highly popular Rights of Man as a response to Burke. Paine commended 

the French revolution for erasing a host of feudal and ecclesiastical privileges which the favored 

classes and families of past generations had claimed for themselves into perpetuity – at the 

expense of later generations’ majorities.45 Both men chose to frame their arguments in terms of 

the rights of later generations.

3. Natural Resources in the Framers’ Intergenerational Philosophy

The founders and their contemporaries understood and recognized each generation’s 

fundamental obligation to preserve the value and integrity of natural resources for later 

generations. This preservation principle, embedded in the Anglo-American legal constructs of 

42Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution 28 (Dolphin ed. 1961).

43 Id. at 110.

44Id. at 108-110.

45Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791) in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Eric Foner ed., 

New York 1995).

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entail, usufruct, and waste were ethical bedrock in the late 1700’s. Intergenerational 

responsibility for land was more familiar, and more widely acknowledged, than intergenerational 

political rights and economic rights. That is why, when writers of the period sought to describe 

the proper political relations between generations, many of them, including Jefferson, relied 

upon metaphors and analogies involving land.

When Burke wished to condemn the revolutionaries of France, he did so by 

characterizing them as irresponsible life-tenants who would commit waste upon an estate.46

Jefferson’s Usufruct

The most systematic treatment of intergenerational principles left to us by the founders 

was provided by Jefferson in his famous letter of September 6, 1789.47 That letter was 

Jefferson’s final installment in a two-year correspondence with James Madison on the proposed 

Bill of Rights.48 Given the importance of this letter as background material for the Bill of 

46Burke, Reflections at 108 (“. . . [O]ne of the first and most leading principles on which the 

commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is, lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in 

it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors or of what is due to their posterity, 

should act as if they were the entire masters, that they should not think it among their rights to 

cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance by destroying at their pleasure the whole 

original fabric of society, hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a 

habitation . . ..”).

47Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789, Boyd XV, 392-98. The letter has been 

extensively studied by Jefferson scholars; I make no attempt to fully recapitulate that scholarship 

in this article. Some of the better known treatments include: David N. Mayer, The Constitutional 

Thought of Thomas Jefferson 302-308 (University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville, 1994) “The 

Earth Belongs to the Living”; Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Sovereignty of the Living 

Generation,’ 52 Virginia Quarterly Review 437-44 (1976); Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and 

Nature: An Interpretation, chap. 5, esp. 161-64. (Baltimore, 1988).

48See also Thomas Jefferson to Madison, in Boyd at 12:439-43; 13:442-43; 14:188-89, 159-61; 

15:367-68. Jefferson’s interest in intergenerational equity at this time was inspired in part by a 

conversation which took place between himself, Thomas Paine and the Marquis de LaFayette in 

February, 1788 – a conversation prompted by James Wilson’s arguments in the Pennsylvania 

ratification convention disputing the need for a bill of rights.

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Rights,49 and its independent value as a seminal statement of intergenerational equity principles, 

it serves as the natural starting point for a discussion of the framers’ views on generational 

sovereignty and the land. 

Jefferson begins his letter by asserting that:

“The question [w]hether one generation of men has a right to bind another. . . is a 

question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also among 

the fundamental principles of every government. . . . I set out on this ground, 

which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the 

living’ . . ..”

50

Since Jefferson based his philosophy regarding generational political and economic 

relations upon this “self-evident” principle of usufructary ownership of the earth,

51 I will 

examine the language employed to express the principle. Of most importance is the word: 

usufruct.

The legal concept of usufruct can be traced back at least as far as ancient Roman law52

and has changed little over the centuries. In Jefferson’s time, as now, “usufruct” referred to “the 

right to make all the use and profit of a thing that can be made without injuring the substance of 

49 Jefferson’s letter was written just a few weeks before Congress passed the Bill of Rights. See 

Ellis p. 123-25 (describing Jefferson’s influential role as bill of rights proponent). 

50Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789, supra note 55 (emphasis in original).

51The reference to intergenerational rights as “self-evident” recalls the Declaration of 

Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they 

are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . ..” Jefferson would continue for 

the remainder of his life to characterize intergenerational obligations in this way. See Jefferson to 

Thomas Earle, September 24, 1823 (“That our Creator made the earth for the use of the living 

and not of the dead; . . . that one generation of men cannot foreclose or burden its use to another . 

. . . these are axioms so self-evident that no explanation can make them plainer”).

52See, e.g. W. Hamilton Bryson, The Use of Roman Law in Virginia Courts, 28 Am. J. Legal 

Hist. 135-46 (1984); Sloan, p. 82 (“Like a trusted family counselor, Jefferson drew up a deed of 

settlement ensuring future generations the right to benefit from the common property, and the 

means he employed . . . was familiar doctrine to eighteenth-century Anglo-American lawyers.”)

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the thing itself.”53 A usufruct described the rights and responsibilities of tenants, trustees, or 

other parties temporarily entrusted with the use of an asset – usually land.54

Under the common law, the doctrine of usufruct was (and remains) closely conjoined 

with the doctrine prohibiting waste, defined by Blackstone as “a spoil or destruction in houses, 

gardens, trees, or other corporeal hereditaments, to the disheison of him that hath the remainder 

or reversion.”55 Taken together, the two doctrines of usufruct and waste provide that a present 

possessor is entitled to the beneficial use of the natural estate and its fruits, but cannot prejudice 

future interest holders by destroying or impairing the estate’s essential character or long-term 

productivity.56 Jefferson’s philosophy that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living partially 

reiterates the biblical/Lockean paradigm of the earth as intergenerational commons, the benefits 

of which should be accessible to every member of every generation.

Relying on this widely shared principle of intergenerational stewardship, Jefferson 

maintained that each individual, and each generation collectively, had the obligation to pass on 

the natural estate undiminished and unencumbered to later generations:

[N]o man can by natural right, oblige lands he occupied... to the payment of debts

contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the

usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would

53 Sir Robert Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law, Delivered at the University of 

Oxford, 1767-1773, 2:85, 2 vols. (Thomas M. Curley ed., Madison, Wis., 1986). 

54 By using the terminology of tenancies to describe the relations between generations, Jefferson 

endorses a metaphor as old as the Old Testament. Jefferson later explicates and embellishes this 

landlord-tenant analogy. See, e.g. Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, Monticello, June 24, 

1813, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson vol. XIII, 269-270 (“Each generation has the usufruct of 

the earth during the period of its continuance. . . . . [T]he case may be likened to the ordinary one 

of a tenant for life, who may hypothecate the land for his debts, during the continuance of his 

usufruct; but at his death, the reversioner (who is also for life only) receives it exonerated from 

all burthen.”).

552 Blackstone, Commentaries at 281. 

56The legal doctrines of usufruct and waste resemble Locke’s prohibition against spoilage or 

destruction of “the fruits of nature.” See Locke, Second Treatise, ¶¶ 31 and 46. It is likely that 

Locke based his prohibitions, at least in part, upon these accepted legal doctrines. 

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belong to the dead rather than the living, which would be the reverse of our 

principal. What is true of every member of the society individually, is true of 

them all collectively, since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of 

the rights of the individuals.57

For Jefferson, “eating up the usufruct” means extinguishing the next generation’s ability 

to share equitably in the benefits of a natural resource. No individual or society has authority to 

cause such extinction, whatever personal or collective rights they may allege. The contemporary 

issue to which Jefferson’s arguments most literally apply is the problem of topsoil depletion. As 

a planter of predominantly agrarian Virginia, Jefferson often phrased his discussions of 

intergenerational issues -- even economic issues -- in terms of soil: 

“Are [later generations] bound to acknowledge [a national debt created to satisfy 

short-term interests], to consider the preceding generation as having had a right to 

eat up the whole soil of their country, in the course of a life . . .? Every one will 

say no; that the soil is the gift of God to the living, as much as it had been to the 

deceased generation . . ..”

58

Jefferson asserts that each generation has the right to inherit, undiminished, the same 

topsoil capital that its predecessors enjoyed.59

57 Jefferson to Madison, September 6, 1789, supra., n. 54 (emphasis added). See also Jefferson to 

Thomas Earle, September 24, 1823, L and B 15:470-71 (“That our Creator made the earth for the 

use of the living and not of the dead; . . . that one generation of men cannot foreclose or burden 

its use to another, . . . . . [T]hese are axioms so self-evident that no explanation can make them 

plainer . . .”). Herbert Sloan characterizes Jefferson’s convictions accurately: “The earth may 

belong to the living, but the living enjoy only its usufruct, only its current product. That 

qualification is critical, for it forbids the living generation to commit waste, and thus each 

generation becomes a mere tenant for life, empowered only to enjoy the fruits of the estate, not 

to dispose of it in its entirety. . . . [E]ach generation will serve as a custodian charged with the 

duty of passing on intact what it receives from its predecessors. The impression such a project 

creates is decidedly conservative. . . His answer is to . . . husband existing resources.” Sloan, 

Principles and Interest, 60. 

58Jefferson to Eppes, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson vol. XIII, 269-270 

59As evidence of Jefferson’s special concern for long-term soil productivity, see his 

Commonplace Book pp. 166-67; and Jefferson to Lafayette, April 11, 1787, The Portable 

Thomas Jefferson 421-23.

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The same experiences and authorities that shaped Jefferson’s conception of 

intergenerational obligations—authorities such as Plato, the Old Testament prophets, Aquinas, 

Locke, and Sidney—also helped to shape the views of his contemporaries. The biblical notion 

that God granted the world to Adam and his posterity in common was part of mainstream 

American legal thought.60 In his exhaustive examination of Jefferson’s generational theories, 

Herbert Sloan remarks that, “what makes Jefferson’s views important . . . is not so much that he 

held them, but that they were widely shared.”61 These widely shared principles of usufructary 

responsibility for natural resources were significant in shaping the early traditions and 

conscience of America and find voice in state constitutions62 and federal statutes today.63

The United States’ arguments in 1893 in the Tribunal of Arbitration illustrate the 

continuing vitality of these principles over the next century: 

The earth was designed as the permanent abode of man through ceaseless 

generations. Each generation, as it appears upon the scene, is entitled only to use 

the fair inheritance. It is against the law of nature that any waste should be 

committed to the disadvantage of the succeeding tenants. . . . That one generation 

may not only consume or destroy the annual increase of the products of the earth, 

but the stock also, thus leaving an inadequate provision for the multitude of 

successors which it brings into life, is a notion so repugnant to reason as scarcely 

to need formal refutation.”

64

60See Blackstone, Commentaries, 2:3 (“The earth therefore, and all things therein, are the general 

property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the creator.”) See 

also Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, 396 (“It is wrong to say that God made Rich and Poor; he 

made only Male and Female; and he gave them the earth for their inheritance”).

61Sloan, Principles and Interest 5. See also Sloan at 75 (detailing how the earth-as-commons 

theme played a significant role in the political theories of Locke, Sidney, and Paine.)

62 See, e.g., Pa. Const. art. I, § 27; Mont. Const. art. IX, § 1; Haw. Const. art. IX, § 1; and Ill. 

Const. art XI, § 1.

63 See, e.g., National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, § 101(b)(1), 42 U.S.C. § 4331(b)(1) 

(1970) (“[I]t is the continuing responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable 

means, consistent with other essential considerations of national policy, to . . . fulfill the 

responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations.”).

64 Argument of the United States, Fur Seal Arbitration (U.S. v. Gr. Brit. 1893), reprinted in 9 

Fur Seal Arbitration: Proceedings of the Tribunal of Arbitration (Gov’t Printing Office 1895); 

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C. Unalienable (Intergenerational) Rights to Life, Liberty and Property

One of the most potent philosophic ideas of 18th century America was the concept of

“unalienable” rights,

65 which denoted a set of rights that one generation could not alienate from 

another generation.

As is noted above, the framers were as concerned with the proper balancing of interests 

between generations as with the proper balancing of interests within generations; both concerns 

informed their understanding of the named rights in the Constitution.

A clear example of this tendency is the set of rights – life, liberty, and property –

protected by the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment. This particular grouping of rights 

had a rich political and philosophical background with which the framers were intimately 

familiar. They had been acknowledged by John Locke, among others. In response to British 

claims that the colonists had lost such rights (recognized by the Magna Carta and English Bill of 

Rights) through waiver or acquiescence on the part of their ancestors, the colonists affirmed that 

no such waiver was possible, because the rights were “unalienable.” The Virginia Bill of Rights 

(1776) is illustrative. Its preamble states that it is a “Declaration of Rights made by the good 

people of Virginia in the exercise of their sovereign powers, which rights do pertain to them and 

their posterity, as the basis and foundation of government.” It goes on in Article one to explain 

that:

[A]ll men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent

rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot . . . deprive or

divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty with the means of

also reprinted in 1 John Bassett Moore, History and Digest of the International Arbitrations to 

Which the United States Has Been A Party 755, 813-14 (1898).

65Although “inalienable” is the standard modern usage, the Declaration of Independence used the 

phrase “unalienable rights.”

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acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and 

safety.

(emphasis added)

While some of these unalienable intergenerational rights, such as the right to liberty, were 

primarily individual in nature, others, such as the unalienable right to “alter or abolish”

government, were public rights,66 belonging to posterity collectively. 

Professor A.E. Dick Howard maintains that the committee draft of the Virginia 

declaration, cited above, is “the most influential constitutional document in American history.”

67

The Virginia document’s intergenerational focus would eventually find an echo in the Due 

Process and Posterity clauses of the Constitution – not surprising, given the heavy involvement 

of George Mason and James Madison, both of whom helped to draft the Virginia Declaration, in 

the Constitutional Convention.

68

Before the drafting of the Constitution, the philosophy of the Virginia Declaration found 

its way into the Declaration of Independence. Joseph Ellis has emphasized the role which the 

66See United States Declaration of Independence, par. 2 (1776) (“[W]henever any Form of 

Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish 

it, and to institute new Government . . .”). See also Virginia Declaration of Right, Art III 

(“whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority 

of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter or 

abolish it”); “South Carolina’s Ratification Proclamation” (May 23, 1788) in Bailyn at 2: 556 

(“The [state’s] right to regulate elections to the Federal Legislature, and to direct the manner, 

times, and places of holding the same is, and ought to remain to all posterity, a fundamental 

right”).

67Howard, Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia 56 (1974).

68Sutton, Revolution to Secession: Constitution Making in the Old Dominion 20-21 (1987) (also 

on the committee was Patrick Henry).

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Virginia document played in the shaping of the federal Declaration.69 It is a matter of record that 

the Virginia declaration was adopted June 12, 1776. Jefferson received a copy in Philadelphia, 

and drafted his first version of the Declaration of Independence sometime the following week.70

The Declaration of Independence proclaims that: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they 

are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these 

are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.71

Jefferson substituted the phrase “unalienable rights” for “cannot deprive or divest their 

posterity,” but the meaning was clear to his contemporaries. By conjoining the “life, liberty . . .”

formulation of the Second Treatise with the Virginia Declaration’s intergenerational unalienable 

principle, Jefferson and the other signatories strongly referenced Locke’s intergenerational 

philosophy and the rights of later generations.

Accordingly, the intergenerational aspects of the founders “unalienable rights”

philosophy must be accorded due weight in any analysis of Posterity’s asserted rights under the 

Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

D. A Uniform Time Discount Rate is Inconsistent with Principles of

Intergenerational Justice

One recent governmental practice that is markedly inconsistent with the framers’ 

intergenerational philosophies expressed above is that of “pure time discounting.” The 

69Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson 56-65 (Random House, 

New York 1998) (“On the eve of writing the Declaration, Jefferson was thinking ... about 

Virginia’s new constitution.”).

70Id.

71 United States Declaration of Independence, par. 2 (1776) (emphasis added).

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International Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) estimates that time discount rates are the 

second most important factor in evaluating the effects of climate change.72 

When federal agencies perform required cost benefit analyses during the development of 

policies likely to affect levels of carbon emissions, they apply a pure discount rate.73 Critics of 

discounting have noted that “discounting ensures that future generations will receive less 

attention, and perhaps far less attention, than those now living.”74 Application of a pure discount 

rate literally treats future harms and future deaths as having only a fraction of the value of 

present harms and deaths. Assuming that the rights to life, liberty, due process and equal 

protection apply to future generations, as the Posterity clause of the Preamble suggests, this 

deliberate procedural discrimination would seem to constitute a prima facie constitutional 

violation. 

IV. Conclusion

The interests of children and future generations in protecting their vital resources from 

irreversible damage is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the Nation, and a central 

underpinning of the Constitution itself. In the Preamble, the framers ordained and established the 

Constitution “to ourselves and our Posterity.” U.S. Const. pmbl. 

If plaintiffs factual allegations are correct, then it would appear that the present adult 

generations, acting through their elected representatives, have become the sort politically 

72 See David A. Weisbach & Cass R. Sunstein, Climate Change and Discounting the Future: A 

Guide for the Perplexed, Reg-Markets Center Working Paper No. 08-19, Harvard Public Law 

Working Paper No. 08-20; Harvard Law School Program on Risk Regulation Research Paper 

No. 08-12, at 11 (Aug. 12, 2008), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1223448 or 

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1223448. 

73 U.S. Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon, “Technical Support Document: 

Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order 12866” 17-23 

(2010). 

74 Weisbach & Sunstein, supra note 92, at 3. 

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dominant “faction” that the founders sought to guard against.75 If Plaintiffs’ allegations are 

correct, then the politically represented present adult generations have accrued disproportionate 

advantages from unsustainable fossil fuel policies by externalizing most of the costs onto later 

generations, who will not be politically represented until it is too late to reverse the permanent 

consequences of climate destabilization and consequent threats to their constitutional rights. 

Plaintiffs raise a cognizable constitutional claim. 

75 See The Federalist No. 10 (James Madison) (defining a political faction as “a number of 

citizens . . . who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, 

adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the 

community.”) (emphasis supplied). 

s/ Michelle A. Blackwell

Michelle A. Blackwell (OSB No. 002070)

Blackwell Law PC

1209 Pearl Street

Eugene, OR 97401

Tel: (541) 345-8800

mblackwell@blackwell.law

DATED this 24th day of February, 2016.

Respectfully submitted,

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CERTIFICATE OF COMPLIANCE

The undersigned hereby certifies that this brief complies with the applicable word-count 

limitation under LR 7-2(b) because it contains less than 35 pages and 6,564 words, including 

headings, footnotes, and quotations, but excluding the caption, table of contents, table of cases 

and authorities, signature block, exhibits, and any certificates of counsel.

DATED this 24th day of February, 2016.

Respectfully submitted,

s/ Michelle A. Blackwell

Michelle A. Blackwell (OSB No. 002070)

Blackwell Law PC

1209 Pearl Street

Eugene, OR 97401

Tel: (541) 345-8800

mblackwell@blackwell.law

Attorney for Amicus Curiae John E. 

Davidson

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CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE

I hereby certify that on February 24, 2016, I filed a true and correct copy of the foregoing 

document with the Clerk of the Court using the CM/ECF system, which will automatically 

generate service to the following counsel of record:

JULIA OLSON (OR Bar 062230) 

JuliaAOlson@gmail.com

WILD EARTH ADVOCATES 

1216 Lincoln Street

Eugene, OR 97401 

Tel: (415) 786-4825

DANIEL M. GALPERN (OR Bar 061950) 

dan.galpern@gmail.com

LAW OFFICES OF DANIEL M. 

GALPERN 

1641 Oak Street

Eugene, OR 97401 

Tel: 541-968-7164

JOSEPH W. COTCHETT 

jcotchett@cpmlegal.com

PHILIP L. GREGORY (pro hac vice) 

pgregory@cpmlegal.com

PAUL N. MCCLOSKEY 

pmccloskey@cpmlegal.com

COTCHETT, PITRE & McCARTHY, LLP 

San Francisco Airport Office Center

840 Malcolm Road

Burlingame, CA 94010

Tel: 650-697-6000

Fax: 650-697-0577

Attorneys for Plaintiffs

SEAN C. DUFFY

U.S. Department of Justice Environment &

Natural Resources Division 

P.O. Box 7611

Washington, DC 20044

Tel: 202-305-0445

Fax: 202-305-0506

Email: sean.c.duffy@usdoj.gov

Attorney for Federal Defendants

BENJAMIN E. TANNEN 

Sidley Austin LLP

1501 K Street, NW 

Washington, DC 20005 

Tel: 202-736-8574

Fax: 202-736-8711

Email: btannen@sidley.com

C. MARIE ECKERT

Miller Nash Graham & Dunn LLP 

111 SW Fifth Avenue

Suite 3400

Portland, OR 97204

Tel: 503-205-2477

Fax: 503-224-0155

Email: marie.eckert@millernash.com

QUIN M. SORENSON 

Sidley Austin LLP 

1501 K Street, NW 

Washington, DC 20005 

Tel: 202-736-8000

Fax: 202-736-8711

Email: qsorenson@sidley.com 

Case 6:15-cv-01517-TC Document 60 Filed 02/24/16 Page 44 of 45
ROGER R. MARTELLA, JR. 

Sidley Austin LLP

1501 K Street, NW 

Washington, DC 20005 

Tel: 202-736-8097

Fax: 202-736-8711

Email: rmartella@sidley.com

Attorneys for Intervenors-Defendants

By: s/ Michelle A. Blackwell

Michelle A. Blackwell (OSB No. 002070)

Blackwell Law PC

1209 Pearl Street

Eugene, OR 97401

Tel: (541) 345-8800

mblackwell@blackwell.law

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