The court reverses a $10,000 civil penalty imposed on the city for operating a solid waste incinerator without a state permit. The city has known since 1970 that the incinerator was not in compliance with state air pollution standards.The Illinois Pollution Control Board filed a complaint in 1973, a...

The court denies a request that a temporary restraining order (TRO) be issued prohibiting defendant public utility from transferring spent nuclear fuel from the reactor at the Trojan Nuclear Plant to an on-site waste storage facility. The on-site facility was designed to handle spent-fuel containers...

The court holds that under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) defendants need not prepare an environmental impact statement in connection with the decision to store indefinitely spent nuclear fuel in facilities intended only for short-term storage. Six weeks earlier, the court had denied p...

The Supreme Court affirms a Sixth Circuit decision enjoining closure of the nearly completed Tellico Dam because filling the reservoir behind the dam would destroy the critical habitat of the snail darter, an endangered species. The language and legislative history of §7 of the Endangered Species A...

The United States Supreme Court determines that the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the liability of federally licensed nuclear power plants for damages resulting from nuclear accidents to $560 million, does not violate either the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitutio...

The court dismisses a suit to require the Secretary of Agriculture to withdraw a report to Congress on H.R. 39, the Alaska lands bill, until a land use management plan for the Tongass National Forest has been completed. Declining to find that the report embodied agency recommendations for legislativ...

The United States Supreme Court, by a 6-3 margin, concludes that §8 of the Reclamation Act of 1902 allows a state to impose conditions on the control, appropriation, use, and distribution of water from a federal reclamation project as long as the conditions do not conflict with federal law respecti...

The court affirms the lower court's dismissal, for failure to state a claim upon which relief could be granted, of a suit for injunctive relief asking that the defendant proprietor of a sports stadium be enjoined from permitting the smoking of tobacco during public events. The court finds that plain...

The court grants defendants' motion to dismiss for lack of ripeness a suit seeking an injunction against further consideration by the National Park Service (NPS) of plans to construct a bridge across federal park land affording access to private property pending preparation of an environmental impac...

The court vacates a preliminary injunction against construction of an interstate highway bridge over Lake Chautauqua after determining that defendants have fulfilled the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and §4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act of 1966. Although ...