The skinny-label bargain

First: let me briefly introduce the regulation that produces the so-called “skinny label.” The Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984 created the modern system for generic-drug approval. Before the Hatch-Waxman Act, a generic manufacturer had to run its own full set of clinical trials to demonstrate safety and efficacy, essentially repeating the brand company’s work at enormous cost. The Act created the Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA), which lets a generic manufacturer rely on the brand’s clinical data by showing only that its product is “bioequivalent” to the brand — that it delivers the same active ingredient to the body in the same way. As a result, roughly ninety percent of prescriptions in this country are now filled with generics. And competition keeps pushing those prices down: the FDA has found that once six or more generic manufacturers share a market, the generic typically sells for more than ninety-five percent below the brand’s pre-competition price.

But a single drug can have multiple approved uses, some still under patent protection and some not. Congress addressed this through what is known as the “section viii statement.” The provision allows a generic manufacturer to obtain FDA approval for fewer than all of a brand drug’s approved indications by carving out the patented uses from its label. The result is a “skinny label”: a label covering only the unpatented indications. The generic reaches the market and competes on price for the unpatented uses, while the brand retains exclusivity over the patented ones.

For all the jargon, the skinny-label pathway is the core mechanism Congress built so that a patent on one use of a drug wouldn’t block generic competition for its other uses. The pathway makes more sense, though, once you see the other routes a generic can take.

When a brand wins FDA approval, it lists its patents in the FDA’s Orange Book, the public directory that tells generics which patents cover which drug. A generic filing an ANDA must address every listed patent, and it has a menu of choices: certify that no patent is listed or that the patents have expired; wait for expiry and then launch (slow, but no litigation); or file a “Paragraph IV” certification challenging the patent as invalid or not infringed. Paragraph IV is the high-risk, high-reward path: the brand almost always sues, and that lawsuit triggers an automatic thirty-month stay on the generic’s approval, but the first filer can earn 180 days of market exclusivity against other generics.

Section viii is the alternative. The generic does not challenge the patent at all; it carves the patented use out of its label and sells only for the unpatented indications. No patent challenge means no thirty-month stay and no up-front litigation. It is supposed to be the fast, safe pathway. The stakes in Hikma are, in short, whether the skinny-label pathway remains fast and safe, or becomes fast and risky.

Enter Vascepa

Amarin Pharma makes a drug called Vascepa, a prescription fish-oil derivative that is, essentially, the company’s entire business. High triglycerides are common enough that many readers have probably had a doctor flag their own, or know someone who has, and Vascepa is the prescription-strength, purified form of omega-3 (not the fish oil on the drugstore shelf!) used to treat them. The FDA approved Vascepa for two different uses. The first, back in 2012, is for dangerously high triglycerides, which at extreme levels can trigger conditions like pancreatitis. The second, added in 2019 after a clinical trial involving some 8,000 patients, reduces cardiovascular risk in high-risk patients already taking a statin. Only that second, cardiovascular use is patented, and by the time this dispute arose, this second use accounted for more than 75 percent of Vascepa’s sales.

Vascepa is not cheap. The brand runs roughly $300 to $500 a month at the pharmacy — well over $4,000 a year for a patient paying out of pocket. The generic, icosapent ethyl, can be found for under $100 a month with a pharmacy discount card. That gap, multiplied across an entire patient population, is why the timing of generic entry matters so much.

As a quick side note: when Hikma first filed its application back in 2016, the only approved use was the original triglyceride indication, and Hikma challenged Amarin’s patents on it head-on with a Paragraph IV certification. Amarin sued, and a court invalidated those patents, clearing the original use entirely. Only the later cardiovascular patents survived, which is why, by the time Hikma launched, the carve-out came down to that single use.

Hikma then did exactly what the skinny-label pathway contemplates. It carved the patented cardiovascular use out of its label with a section viii statement and sought approval only for the original, now-unpatented use. The FDA signed off in May 2020. So far, this is Hatch-Waxman working precisely as designed.

The trouble started, at least from Amarin’s viewpoint, with how Hikma marketed the product. Hikma called the drug a “generic version of Vascepa” and pointed to the total U.S. sales of Vascepa — a figure that swept in the patented use. Hikma’s website listed the product under a broad therapeutic category and noted that it was rated therapeutically equivalent to the brand. Still, Hikma’s launch materials said the product was “not approved for any other indication” beyond the one it was cleared for, and its website carried a disclaimer to the same effect.

Amarin’s theory was that, disclaimers and all, Hikma’s overall message that the product was the “generic version of Vascepa,” paired with sales numbers driven by the patented use, still nudged doctors toward prescribing it for the patented cardiovascular indication. Less than one month after Hikma launched, Amarin sued for what the law calls induced infringement. One fact is hard to ignore: several other companies sell the very same generic compound, but Amarin’s inducement claim went after only one of them. Hikma.

Three judges, three answers

What makes the case interesting is that careful judges kept disagreeing about it. A magistrate judge looked at Amarin’s complaint and thought it should survive. The district judge disagreed and threw it out with prejudice, finding that none of Hikma’s statements were active steps to encourage infringement. The Federal Circuit then disagreed with him, reviving the case on the theory that it was at least plausible that a physician could read Hikma’s statements as encouragement to infringe, and that the whole picture had to be judged in its totality. Three rounds, and no consensus, on the same set of facts. In January, the Supreme Court agreed to break the tie.

How the argument went

At argument in April, three positions emerged. Hikma’s counsel asked for a clear rule: active inducement should require, in his phrase, “a clear message that necessarily promotes infringement,” a standard he grounded in the Court’s 2005 decision in MGM v. Grokster. His strongest points were structural. A generic’s label must mirror the brand’s by law, so punishing Hikma for what its label retained punishes legally compelled conduct; and the Federal Circuit had effectively required Hikma to actively discourage infringement, which inverts a statute that asks only whether it encouraged infringement. He warned that if these post-launch suits routinely survive, no rational generic will use section viii at all, pointing to a comparable case against Teva that produced a $235 million award.

The United States, supporting Hikma on narrower ground, asked only for faithful application of existing law, with no Hatch-Waxman-specific rule, and added that a carved-out label should carry no evidentiary weight at all, since punishing the compliance Congress required punishes the behavior Congress wanted. Brands are not defenseless, the government noted; they can sue the payers whose reimbursement decisions actually drive off-label use.

Amarin, for its part, tried to shrink the case, calling it a narrow pleading dispute about one company’s marketing rather than a referendum on the skinny label. The bench seemed wary of writing any new rule, and once all three lawyers conceded that no new doctrine was needed, a few Justices wondered aloud whether the case was worth deciding at all. If I were a betting woman, and I am not (and I promise I had this written prior to the opinion dropping this morning!), I would have put money on a narrow ruling for Hikma on ordinary pleading standards, no sweeping doctrine, perhaps even a vacate-and-remand.

What the Court held

That is essentially what happened, only more decisively. The Court reversed the Federal Circuit, 9-0. The heart of the opinion is a distinction that sounds technical but does real work: the question is whether Hikma actively encouraged infringement, not whether a doctor could read Hikma’s statements as encouragement. Statements designed to stimulate infringement, Justice Jackson wrote, are a narrower category than statements that merely could. Inducement under § 271(b) takes affirmative, purposeful steps; it does not reach the ordinary acts of selling a product that someone else might put to an infringing use.

By that measure, Amarin’s theory failed at every turn. Several of Hikma’s statements had an obvious innocent explanation: Hikma was complying with the law. A generic’s label must, by statute, match the brand’s except for the carved-out use — the duty of sameness — so Hikma could not be faulted for what its label retained. And describing a product as a “generic version” or “generic equivalent” of the brand is, as the Court put it, normal industry practice. The Court refused to put generic makers between a rock and a hard place by turning compliance with the law into the building blocks of illegal conduct. Other parts of Amarin’s case rested on what Hikma left unsaid, but omissions and silence, the Court held, cannot carry an active-inducement claim. And what remained was simply too vague to count: a patient leaflet’s side-effect warning, a website listing a broad therapeutic category and an “AB” equivalence rating, and sales figures in press releases plainly aimed at investors rather than doctors. That last theory, the Court observed, required a chain of inferences that was possible but not plausible, and possible has never been the standard.

The Court also turned away both sides’ attempts to move the law. It rejected Amarin’s expansive “could be read as encouragement” approach, but it also rejected Hikma’s position that inducement must be express; implicit encouragement can qualify, so long as it is clear and affirmative. And in a pointed footnote, the Court disapproved the Federal Circuit’s recent habit, visible in cases like its GSK v. Teva decision, of asking how providers might read a generic’s statements rather than whether the generic actually encouraged infringement. That was the very trend that had been leaving skinny-label defendants increasingly exposed.

Why this matters more than the statehouse

Here is why I think this modest-looking case matters more than the louder drug-pricing battles in state capitols. The single biggest determinant of what a patient pays for a drug is whether a generic exists, and when generics arrive is governed by federal patent law, not by state regulation. States have been busy on the back end: more than twenty have passed transparency laws, at least ten have stood up affordability boards, and in October 2025 Colorado became the first state to set an enforceable cap on a specific drug, limiting payment for the arthritis biologic Enbrel, though that cap does not take effect until 2027, if it survives the maker’s constitutional challenge. Here in Wisconsin, legislators have tried more than once to create such a board, and Governor Evers wrote one into his latest budget, but none has survived the legislature. Lots of motion, little movement on price.

The skinny label is a front-end lever, and a powerful one. A 2024 research letter in the Annals of Internal Medicine estimated that skinny-label generics saved Medicare Part D about $14.6 billion across just fifteen drugs between 2015 and 2021. Had the Court gone the other way and blessed the Federal Circuit’s approach, every generic weighing a section viii carve-out would have had to price in the risk of a post-launch inducement suit, with damages that can run into the hundreds of millions, and some would have walked away from the pathway altogether for the highest-value drugs. Congress has bipartisan bills aimed at the patent tactics that delay competition, but they keep stalling. For now, the most powerful lever on drug prices runs through federal patent law, and a unanimous Supreme Court just used it to keep generics flowing.

The case will return to the lower courts, but Amarin’s theory, as it built it, is finished, and because the original dismissal was with prejudice, its room to start over looks slim. The larger takeaway is simpler. The skinny label survives, and with it one of the few dependable tools we have for getting cheaper drugs to patients sooner. For a fish-oil pill, that is a surprisingly large legacy.

This is the last in a series of three blog posts, at the end of the academic year, by the director of the Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice.

In many ways, restorative justice is the opposite of a shortcut.

It asks law students to slow down, sit with discomfort, listen to one another, and resist the urge to immediately judge or fix. It requires presence. It requires vulnerability. And, perhaps most importantly, it requires humanity. In a time when technology, including artificial intelligence in particular, is reshaping how students learn and process information, restorative justice has become one of the most profound human experiences in my classroom at Marquette Law School, through the work of the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice.

Like many educators, I have watched students turn to technology for answers, for summaries, for efficiency. And I understand the appeal. The law is complex. The reading is dense. The days are long. But restorative justice has taught me that much important learning in a law school classroom is not found in the quickest answer, the perfect outline, or a polished response generated in seconds. It is found in the pause before speaking. In the courage to share a personal story. In the humility to listen.

Restorative justice does not translate well into an algorithm.

When students sit in a circle, there is no back row, nor is there a front of the room. No raised hand to compete for a professor’s attention. No performative answers given for a grade. Instead, there is a talking piece, a shared set of values, and an invitation to be fully seen and heard. It is in that space that something extraordinary happens. Students are better able to recognize one another not just as classmates, but as fellow human beings shaped by family, trauma, faith, identity, fear, hope, and love. These circles, whether on campus, in the community, or inside correctional institutions, are at the heart of the Andrew Center’s work.

As Justice Janine Geske, who inaugurated the restorative justice initiative at Marquette Law School, often says, “Restorative justice offers all of us the opportunity to speak our truth and be truly heard.” Her decades of guiding circles, victim–offender dialogues, and student learning experiences continue to shape how we teach and practice justice at Marquette Law School.

I’ve watched future lawyers, who are trained to argue and to analyze, sit in silence as they listen to the story of a father who lost his child to violence. I have seen them wrestle with forgiveness and the reality that a person who caused harm was once a child who experienced unimaginable harm himself. I have seen the shift in posture, in voice, and in perspective. These are not lessons that come from textbooks or chatbots. They come from presence.

One student captured the impact of restorative justice in a powerful reflection at the end of the semester:

“The lessons learned during our circle have fundamentally shaped my vision of what it means to be an attorney who fights for justice. It has not only enriched my legal education but has also instilled in me a deep commitment to promoting healing and reconciliation within our communities.”

That sense of purpose will benefit from the process of outlining cases and mastering doctrine. But it grew out of sitting in circles, listening to stories of harm and resilience, and witnessing the possibility of repair. In that space, students come to understand that being a lawyer is not only about argument and analysis; it is also about responsibility, compassion, and the courage to engage in healing, even when it is uncomfortable.

In a world that often rewards detachment, restorative justice dares students to care. In a culture that increasingly values speed, it teaches us to slow down and reflect. In a system that is built around rules and consequences, it makes space for empathy, accountability, and repair.

Restorative justice has reshaped not only how students speak and listen, but also how many of them begin to understand advocacy itself. They become more attentive to harm, responsibility, and the human impact of decisions. Their writing reflects greater empathy and curiosity, and their advocacy becomes more grounded in dignity, lived experience, and understanding alongside rigorous legal analysis.

Restorative justice does not diminish analytical rigor; it deepens it. Students who learn to sit with complexity and contradiction often approach legal problems differently. They negotiate differently. They question power differently. And they begin to enter their future roles as lawyers, judges, policymakers, and community leaders with refined emotional intelligence and a broader understanding of what justice can be.

In that way, restorative justice has reshaped my classroom by keeping our shared humanity at the center.

The tools around us will continue to evolve. Artificial intelligence will continue to grow more sophisticated. The law will continue to change. But there is no replacement for sitting in a circle, looking someone in the eye, hearing their story, and realizing that justice is not just something we argue about. It is something we practice together.

In this moment, teaching restorative justice at Marquette Law School feels less like a course and more like an act of quiet resistance. A reminder that even in the age of machines, it is still the human voice, the human heart, and the human story that have the power to transform

This is the second of three blog posts, at the end of the academic year, by the director of the Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice

On April 25, I had the privilege of closing out the G. Lane Ware Leadership Academy at the State Bar of Wisconsin. It was an inspiring day filled with lawyers who have invested in their growth, their leadership, and their commitment to the profession.

In my keynote, I spoke about what I have come to understand about restorative leadership as a way of leading that is grounded not just in skill or strategy, but in how we show up for others, especially in moments of challenge, conflict, and uncertainty. Leadership, I shared, is not something we step into one day. It is something we practice every day, in small and often unseen moments.

My path into the legal profession—and eventually to the bench and now to the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice—was shaped by a simple but powerful lesson: service matters. From watching my mother and father quietly serve others in our community, to taking early pro bono cases and walking alongside clients in crisis, I came to understand that the law is not just about rules or outcomes. It is about people, dignity, and being present when others need support most. Over time, I began to understand that those experiences were not just shaping my career—they were shaping how I lead.

At its core, restorative leadership asks us to lead differently. In a time when our communities, and often our conversations, feel divided and reactive, restorative leadership invites us to slow down and ask better questions:

• Who is being affected here?
• What do they need right now?
• What is my responsibility in making things right?

These are not just questions for restorative justice dialogues. They are leadership questions that we can bring into our daily work, whether we are in a courtroom, a conference room, or a difficult conversation. Restorative leadership is grounded in listening. It requires courage and humility. And it calls us to remain present in hard moments rather than turning away from them.

One of the key messages I wanted to leave with the Academy participants was this: leadership is a practice.

It shows up in small, everyday decisions:

• Taking an extra moment to listen before responding
• Asking a question instead of making an assumption
• Making space for voices that have not been heard
• Choosing dialogue over reaction

These are not grand gestures, but they are powerful. They shape how trust is built, how conflict is navigated, and how relationships are sustained.

For me, some of the most meaningful leadership lessons came not from formal titles, but from service. Through pro bono work, state bar involvement, and community partnerships, I learned how to listen, build consensus, and work across differences. Those spaces became training grounds—places where leadership could be practiced, refined, and strengthened over time.

Looking back, saying “yes” to those opportunities was not just about giving back. It was about growing into the kind of leader I hoped to become. I had moments of doubt, such as times when the demands of the profession felt overwhelming and the path forward uncertain. Those moments are not signs of failure. They are part of the journey.

What sustains me, and what I hope sustains others, is a return to purpose. A reminder of why we entered this profession in the first place: to serve, to support, and to help others move forward. In many ways, that is what restorative leadership asks of us: to stay present, to keep listening, and to continue showing up with intention even when it is difficult.

As the participants of the Leadership Academy step forward into their next chapter, my hope is that they carry with them not just new skills, but a renewed sense of how they want to lead. For our profession does not just need capable lawyers. It needs leaders who can build bridges in fractured spaces. Leaders who can listen across differences. Leaders who can bring humanity into systems that too often feel impersonal.

Restorative leadership is not a theory. It is a daily practice. And it begins with a simple question: What is mine to do—right now—to make things better?

This is the first of three blog posts, at the end of the academic year, by the director of the Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice

One of the greatest privileges of teaching the Restorative Justice Workshop at Marquette Law School is watching students deepen not only as future lawyers but as human beings.

Law school asks a great deal of students. It teaches discipline, analytical rigor, advocacy, precision, and resilience. Those are essential skills, and I deeply value legal education and the extraordinary faculty and experiences our students encounter throughout their journey. But alongside intellectual growth, many students are also trying to hold onto something more personal: their sense of purpose, humanity, and connection to the people behind the cases.

This semester, one student’s final reflection captured that tension with remarkable honesty. I relate this with full permission even as I have elected not to attribute it.

The student wrote that coming into her final semester of law school, she felt as though she had “lost something.” This was not because law school had failed her, but because the pace and pressure of achievement can sometimes narrow our focus. She described becoming consumed by reading, outlining, internships, and the next assignment until she no longer felt connected to the “bigger picture of what it all meant.”

Then she encountered restorative justice.

The student’s final project in our workshop centered on a restorative justice circle for women in litigation. What began as an academic project evolved into something far more personal and transformative. She reflected on how the circle illuminated the subtle but deeply felt experiences many women navigate in the legal profession, such as interruptions, second-guessing, and differing perceptions of confidence and competence.

But what moved me most was not simply what she learned about the profession. It was what she learned about listening, humanity, and the limits of the traditional “fix-it” mindset many lawyers carry.

At one point she wrote:

“Restorative justice is not always about fixing something immediately, but about recognizing that something exists in the first place.”

That insight captures so much of what restorative justice invites us to do.

In the legal profession, we are often trained to move quickly toward solutions, conclusions, and outcomes. Restorative justice does not reject accountability or resolution—but it reminds us that healing and understanding often begin before resolution. Sometimes people first need space to speak honestly about their experiences and know that someone is truly listening.

The student described struggling with the uncertainty of that process. She admitted that she initially wanted the circle to feel “complete.” She wanted clear outcomes. She wanted participants to leave with a sense that something had been definitively resolved. Instead, she left with discomfort. And then, slowly, she realized that the discomfort itself carried meaning.

One circle participant later shared that the conversation helped her understand experiences she had previously dismissed. Another participant left feeling newly determined to advocate for herself professionally. The student began to understand that restorative justice is not always measured by tidy outcomes or immediate repair. Sometimes the impact lives in quieter places such as in recognition, validation, reflection, dignity, or a subtle shift in how someone sees themselves.

She wrote beautifully about this tension between outcome and process:

“People felt different because they did not have to win. People were included. People were heard.”

That line stayed with me.

So much of modern life, and certainly of litigation, conditions people to believe they must prevail, persuade, defend, or perform. Restorative justice creates a different kind of space. A space where people do not need to “win” in order to matter. A space where listening itself becomes meaningful.

Another passage that deeply resonated with me was the student’s reflection that restorative justice “is a process that allows people to see themselves more clearly.” I have seen that happen again and again in this workshop. Students come into the course expecting to learn about restorative justice. What they often do not anticipate is how much they will learn about themselves. Through circles, dialogues, community experiences, and encounters with survivors, incarcerated individuals, violence interrupters, and community leaders, students begin to understand that the law lives inside real human stories. They also begin to understand their own voice, fears, assumptions, and values more clearly.

This student reflected candidly on her own self-doubt. She questioned whether she belonged in the room, whether she was “good enough,” whether she deserved to occupy space in the profession. Her honesty about those feelings was powerful, especially because so many students quietly carry similar questions.

And yet, over the course of the semester, she also began to reclaim confidence. It was not confidence rooted in having every answer, but confidence rooted in presence, listening, humility, and authenticity. She wrote:

“I became less focused on being right, and more focused on understanding.”

As a professor, that sentence means a great deal to me.

Legal education rightly teaches students to analyze, advocate, and think critically. But alongside those skills, I hope students also leave with the capacity to sit with complexity, to listen without immediately preparing a rebuttal, and to recognize the humanity behind conflict and harm.

One of the most meaningful moments in her reflection came near the end, when she wrote that somewhere along the way in law school, she had stopped thinking about the “bigger picture,” and that this class “gave that back to me.”

She was talking about purpose.

That reflection reminded me why experiential restorative justice education matters so deeply. Students do not simply read about empathy, accountability, harm, or healing. They practice it. They struggle with it. They sit inside uncertainty. They learn that not every human experience can be reduced to a legal issue to solve.

And they begin to see that being a good lawyer is not only about intelligence or argument. It is also about presence, curiosity, integrity, and courage. The willingness to truly hear another person’s story.

Perhaps my favorite line in her paper was this:

“This class taught me that not everything will be resolved cleanly. That there are situations where listening is more important than solving, and where understanding is more important than being right.”

That insight reflects the very heart of restorative justice.

And honestly, it reflects the kind of lawyer, and human being, our world desperately needs.

Today, it has become increasingly clear that wastewater is part of a broad nexus of resource inputs and outputs including water, energy, food, and carbon. The failure to harvest the secondary resources from wastewater has been a missed opportunity, because those resources can play a critical role in efforts to develop a sustainable circular economy and reduce waste generation. That realization has prompted some municipalities to pursue projects aimed at more complete utilization of the resources in the wastewater.

In two recent grant-funded projects,[2] the Law School’s Water Law and Policy Initiative examined pathways to overcoming legal and regulatory barriers to these efforts.

Energy

The wastewater treatment process involves significant energy consumption, but today’s water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) could become net energy generators by extracting energy from the wastewater they clean. Energy costs account for a quarter or more of a typical WRRF’s operating budget. The total annual energy usage for water and wastewater treatment in the United States is approximately 56 billion kilowatt-hours, costing about $4 billion each year, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. In some places, the electrical grid is under significant strain, and heavy energy demand for wastewater treatment could further degrade its functionality.

While estimates vary as to the amount of energy contained in wastewater, there is general agreement that it is significant. By some estimates, assuming complete capture and efficiency, a large WRRF could theoretically power thousands of residential customers with electricity produced from anaerobic digestion; however, this “back of the envelope” calculation neglects losses during the energy production and transmission processes, which can be substantial.

When it comes to harnessing this energy, true success stories are still somewhat rare, in part due to an array of barriers. These include financial barriers such as capital and operational costs, regulatory barriers such as uneven implementation of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, a federal law designed to expand opportunities for renewable energy generation by small power producers like WRRFs, market entry barriers, and state-specific issues such as designation (and regulation) as a public utility. Removing these barriers and extracting this untapped source of energy could be a “game changer.” As described in more detail in a forthcoming publication in the LSU Journal of Energy Law and Resources, policymakers should consider streamlining regulatory policies and energy markets to incentivize those developments.

Nutrients

As compared to energy generation, it has been more common for WRRFs to recycle or even sell the solid component generated by the wastewater treatment process, known as “biosolids,” because biosolids are valuable fertilizer due to the nutrients they contain. But a different problem has arisen in this context.

WRRFs and the municipalities that operate them have struggled to quantify and manage the potential for legal liability resulting from emerging contaminants such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that pass through treatment facilities but are not removed by standard treatment practices. PFAS are hazardous to human health, persistent in the environment, and difficult to remove from wastewater, making for an intractable problem, especially when intertwined with potentially valuable byproducts of the wastewater treatment process such as biosolids.

Our interdisciplinary research effort examined the potential liability concerns associated with PFAS residue in biosolids and then identified preliminary strategies for utilities to control the sources of PFAS discharges to wastewater collection systems. The concerns include responsibility for environmental remediation costs under federal and state laws, toxic tort lawsuits brought by plaintiffs alleging injury caused when they came into contact with PFAS contained in biosolids applied to the land, and enforcement actions resulting from noncompliance with state or federal laws and regulations governing biosolids.

Prohibiting the application of biosolids to the land due to trace PFAS contamination may transfer the risk to groundwater (if the biosolids are impounded in a landfill), strain the assimilative capacity of the environment, and impose financial burdens on municipalities and other operators of public wastewater treatment systems. The only solutions are development of affordable and effective PFAS removal techniques, or source control to keep PFAS out of the waste stream. Wastewater utilities should be very diligent about understanding the sources of wastewater to their operations, the potential risks to human health and the environment, and the legal risks involved. The resulting paper will appear in the Natural Resources Journal published by the University of New Mexico School of Law.

I presented these research results at a recent Law School event held in conjunction with Chicago Water Week presented by Current. A recording of that program is available here.

[1] Stearns v. State Committee on Water Pollution, 274 Wis. 101, 109-10 (1956).

[2] Both projects were funded by the National Science Foundation I/UCRC for Water Equipment and Policy.