Property rights proved far more protected than corporate management prerogatives in environmental law

Evidence

Because both the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act required industry to produce less pollution, the most difficult battles in the antipollution campaign involved the prerogatives of corporate management. Yet the rights of management were not nearly so sacred as the rights of property. Indeed, the threat to property rights became a powerful rallying cry for opponents of environmentalism in the decades to come, and the property rights activists of the 1980s and 1990s often drew on arguments first used against the National Land Use Policy Act in the early 1970s, especially the attack on the “new feudalism.” — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 981

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Legislative power cannot take property without the owner’s consent — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 171; Postwar land protection shifted from public acquisition toward restricting private property — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 719; Legal scholars argued sprawl required regulating land as a social asset with ownership duties — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 943

Broader Connections

• Postwar land protection shifted from public acquisition toward restricting private property #complicates (0.80) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 719
• Legislative power cannot take property without the owner’s consent #contradicts (0.75) — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 171
• Legal scholars argued sprawl required regulating land as a social asset with ownership duties #complicates (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 943