A district court held that an insurance company breached its duty to defend a steel company in an underlying contribution case under Montana's Comprehensive Environmental Cleanup and Responsibility Act (CERCA) stemming from the company's alleged release or threatened release of hazardous substances ...
A district court held that a conservative nonprofit group lacked standing on four of its six claims challenging Colorado's renewable energy standard (RES), which requires utilities to obtain at least 30% percent of its energy from renewable sources by the year 2020. The group claimed that three disc...
A district court held that a coal company violated the CWA and SMCRA by discharging excessive amounts of selenium into the waters of West Virginia. The company argued that the environmental group's lawsuit should be dismissed because it had already entered into a consent decree with the state enviro...
A New York appellate court reversed a lower court decision annulling a local law aimed at preventing the despoilation and destruction of wetlands and watercourses. The lower court ruled that the town enacted the law in violation of New York's State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), but the a...
A California appellate court upheld the issuance of a county permit for a landfill expansion project in the Suisun Marsh, part of the San Francisco Bay tidal estuary. Environmental groups claimed that the permit approvals violate the Sonoma County Local Protection Plan and, specifically, a county or...
A district court held that Minnesota's New Generation Energy Act, which establishes energy and environmental standards related to carbon dioxide emissions, constitutes impermissible extraterritorial legislation and is a per se violation of the dormant Commerce Clause. The statute's plain language ap...
A New Jersey appellate court held that the state's Department of Environmental Protection violated the New Jersey APA when it withdrew from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) program. In 2011, the state posted a notice on the Department's website that is was withdrawing from the RGGI prog...
The Supreme Court of South Carolina reinstated an administrative law court (ALC) decision that reversed and denied a state agency's issuance of a permit for a construction and demolition landfill. The ALC denied the permit based on its conclusion that the region already had more landfill capacity th...
The Ninth Circuit, in a 170+ page opinion, reversed in part and affirmed in part a lower court decision invalidating the FWS' 2008 biological opinion (BiOp) that concluded that the Central Valley Project (CVP) would jeopardize the continued existence of the delta smelt and its habitat. The project s...
A California appellate court, in a pair of related cases, held that the California Department of Water Resources's environmental impact report (EIR) for an underground water bank in southern California violated the California Environmental Quality Act. The bank occupies nearly 30 square miles of und...