The pathways — what a draft can do, and what only a lawyer decides
OSED rests on one conviction: environmental litigation contains a large mechanical layer that is genuinely templatable, sitting beneath a thin layer of judgment that is not. Every task sits somewhere on that spectrum:
- Instruments (a notice, a petition, a consent decree) are templatable. Supply the required elements correctly and the instrument is well-formed. OSED produces these.
- Suit types (a deadline suit, an unreasonable-delay suit) are semi-templatable. A deadline suit is nearly binary — did the agency act by the date? An unreasonable-delay suit turns on a “how long is too long” judgment. OSED drafts the structure and flags the judgment.
- Gating doctrines (standing, ripeness, whether to sue at all) are judgment. They depend on specific facts, forum, strategy, and risk tolerance. OSED does not decide these. It surfaces the question with the controlling law attached and stops — the human attorney decides.
An instrument that drifts toward deciding a gating doctrine is broken. The DRAFT banners and the
inline [⚠ ATTORNEY: ...] flags are the brakes that keep OSED on the mechanical side.
Concern → likely pathway → instrument
| If the concern is roughly… | Likely pathway | The OSED instrument |
|---|---|---|
| A facility is discharging/emitting in violation of a permit or standard | Citizen suit (CWA §505 / CAA §304) | Notice of intent → deadline complaint |
| An agency has missed a mandatory, deadline-bound duty | Deadline (“failure to act”) suit | §304(a)(2) / §505 notice → deadline complaint |
| A rule should exist (or be changed) and doesn’t | Administrative rulemaking | Rulemaking petition |
| A filed deadline suit is being resolved by agreement | Negotiated settlement | Consent-decree scaffold |
| A state-constitution environmental right may apply | State environmental-rights claim | State ERA packet (PA/MT/NY/HI) |
This table maps a concern to a candidate pathway — not a conclusion that the pathway fits, and never a conclusion that there is a case. Which pathway (if any) applies is a judgment call.
The lay-reader walkthrough of each instrument lives in
What each pathway is; the practitioner catalog lives
in the Instrument catalog. See also
../../architecture.md and the six invariants.