A Pennsylvania appellate court held that a family may go forward with its lawsuit against a natural gas company for operating wells on adjacent property to extract natural gas from beneath the family's property via hydraulic fracturing. The family asserted claims for trespass and conversion and soug...

A district court upheld a surface coal mining permit issued to a company even though the cotenant objected to any mining on the property. The company cotenant conveyed the right to enter and surface mine coal to an affiliate, but the other cotenant did not consent to surface mining. Nevertheless, th...

A district court denied motions to dismiss environmental groups' lawsuit challenging Executive Order 13795, “Implementing an America-First Offshore Energy Strategy,” which reversed President Obama’s withdrawal of 128 million acres in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from future oil and gas leasi...

A district court granted California cities' motions to remand their climate change tort actions against oil and gas companies back to state court. Although their state law claims raise national and perhaps global questions, they should not have been removed to federal court. Removal based on federal...

In a 259-page opinion, a federal claims court held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for causing recurrent flooding along the Missouri River. Farmers, landowners, and business owners filed takings claims against the government, arguing that the Corps' management of the Missouri Ri...

A Pennsylvania appellate court reversed and remanded a lower court's decision that the owner of an oil and gas company should be liable for failing to plug 47 abandoned oil and gas wells located in Erie and Crawford Counties. The state environmental agency issued an administrative order requiring th...

A district court issued a preliminary injunction enjoining California from enforcing Proposition 65’s carcinogenicity warning requirement for glyphosate. On the evidence before the court, the required warning for glyphosate does not appear to be factually accurate and uncontroversial because it co...

A district court held that public interest and environmental groups lacked standing to challenge the "two-for-one" executive order issued by President Trump on January 30, 2017. The order requires executive branch agencies to identify two existing regulations to be repealed for every new regulation,...

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 2014 Gun Lake Trust Land Reaffirmation Act, which reaffirmed as trust land certain property on which a Native American tribe wished to build a casino and provided that any future or pending actions relating to that land should be dismissed. Congress enacted the Gun ...

The U.S. Supreme Court, in an unsigned judgment and decree, ordered Wyoming to pay Montana $20,340 in damages, plus $67,270.87 in costs, for reducing the amount of water available in the Tongue River in violation of the Yellowstone River Compact. The Compact protects pre-1950 appropriative rights to...