ABSTRACT
In 1983 the state of Tennessee sued the state of North Carolina charging that it had allowed a Canton, North Carolina paper mill to violate the Clean Water Act. 1 Tennessee claimed that the primary reason for its neighbor’s inaction was the mill’s close proximity to the state line [2, p. 105]. The Champion International mill is located on the Pigeon River 26 miles upstream
from the Tennessee border. This was not the first time state regulators had been accused of giving lenient treatment to polluters located on or near a state border. In 1987 the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving New Hampshire and Vermont [2] 2 In both situations, a neighboring state alleged that another state’s regulators had enforced national pollution laws less stringently, usually by grandfathering high emission levels at older facilities, in order to protect state resident’s income rather than reduce pollution that largely affected nonresidents. A similar debate has taken place over acid rain and other types of air pollution [17].
