William Boyd Explores Forever Chemicals and the Failures of Environmental Regulations in New Paper for Legal Planet

UCLA environmental law professor William Boyd wrote about widespread contamination by PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” and the failures of environmental regulation at Legal Planet and the Law & Political Economy Blog. Boyd criticizes the reliance on risk assessment, which often prioritizes industry interests and delays protective measures, advocating for a hazard-based approach that emphasizes precaution and focuses on preventing the release of harmful chemicals into the environment.

“The goal in all of this should be to move fast and protect people, to use simple default rules to drive innovation toward sustainability and health, and to make clear that the actual harms inflicted on real people living real lives in real places have both a moral and a legal significance that has been largely forgotten in the formulas and balancing acts that we have allowed to colonize the practice of environmental protection,” Boyd wrote.