Environmental Standing in State Courts.

In this paper, I begin to examine the nature of the relationship between state court decisions and the legal issue of environmental standing. Prior to the 1970s, standing rules stood as a barrier keeping many environmental groups out of the courts. The consequences were profound, and the federal courts' standing rules were a hurdle to the advancement of environmental policy. After the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Sierra Club v. Morton, environmental interest groups have achieved more success in standing disputes in federal courts, ushering in a new era of environmental litigation and policy advancement. Despite the extreme importance of standing as a hurdle to environmental litigation, these changes in standing policy have generated very little research to date. In this paper, I present a very initial look at how environmental interest groups have fared in standing disputes in California state courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]