Regime Congruence: Rethinking the Scope of State Responsibility for Transboundary Environmental Harm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The advent of the Anthropocene has extended the reach of environmental harm: from offshore drilling to geoengineering and climate change, activities in one State can increasingly injure people far beyond its borders. States have longstanding rights under customary and international environmental law (IEL) to protect their citizens from such harms. In practice, however, States rarely take action against their sovereign peers, seemingly leaving individual victims without a remedy. This need not be the end of the story. As this Article shows, environmental norms interact with and can find expression through other legal regimes. Focusing on the Inter-American human rights system, of which the United States is a member, this Article asks whether, and to what extent, the obligations that IEL imposes on States vis-a-vis each other should shape the content of duties that States owe under human rights treaties to individual rights-holders beyond their jurisdiction. This issue remains under-analyzed in the literature and under-developed in the jurisprudence. This Article seeks to fill those gaps. It represents the first attempt of its kind to develop a theory of regime congruence and apply it to transboundary environmental harm. Its contributions are threefold. First, it develops an analytical framework to examine the scope of State obligations arising at the “nexus” of two mutually-supportive legal regimes — what I call “regime congruence.” In so doing, it points the way toward a more unified conception of State responsibility and contributes to the literature on the fragmentation of international law. Second, it furthers our understanding of the scope of extraterritorial obligations in international law through exhaustive doctrinal analysis and extends the doctrine to the area of transboundary environmental harm, which is in urgent need of clarification. Finally, it re-conceptualizes the notions of enforcement in IEL by showing that a congruent regime can actually provide more effective remedies to individual victims than IEL itself. The argument developed in this Article has significant implications for access to justice and accountability in the Western Hemisphere. It suggests not only that the United States could incur international responsibility for domestic acts or omissions that cause transboundary harm, but also that individual U.S. residents would be entitled to direct recourse against neighboring States in the Inter-American system whose failure to control domestic pollution violates their rights.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".