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SMU Law Review

Abstract

This Comment addresses recent developments in Antiquities Act jurisprudence. Given the dearth of serious legal challenges confronting the Antiquities Act for the first 100 years of its existence, the past twenty-five years of near continuous controversy have made the Antiquities Act a hot-button issue in environmental law and politics.

As recently as two years ago, the nature of scholarly interest in the Antiquities Act was vastly different. Then, the issue was President Trump’s reduction of the sizes of two major monuments. Questions surfaced about the President’s ability to make such a reduction. With the election of Joe Biden and the boundary correction he made early in his Presidency, such issues have been rendered temporarily moot. In their stead, old questions about the ability of Presidents to create large monuments in the first place have resurfaced.

Today, there are new threats to the Antiquities Act. I will argue that these threats represent the most dire threats in the life of the Antiquities Act and speak directly to the lack of consensus on many issues confronting America today, from climate change to patriotism. In surveying the metaphorical landscape of public lands law, litigation in the Tenth Circuit, combined with a seeming willingness of Chief Justice John Roberts to hear an Antiquities Act challenge, along with the continuing fallout of the accordion-like creation, reduction, and expansion of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, conspire to reduce the avenues Presidents have to protect against climate change and promote American patriotism.

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.25172/smulr.77.4.6