A district court temporarily stayed proceedings in which a pipeline developer sought access to a North Carolina farm for construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The landowner sought to stay the pipeline developer's attempt to acquire eminent domain rights to his property to allow pending challe...

A district court vacated nationwide the Applicability Date Rule, which suspended the effect of the Clean Water Rule until February 2020 and required agencies in the interim to apply the pre-Clean Water Rule definition of "waters of the United States." Environmental groups argued that EPA and the U.S...

A district court declared unconstitutional a California law that regulates the recording of conveyances of federal public lands in the state. DOJ argued that the state law, which grants the State Lands Commission the right of first refusal on transfers of federal public lands, runs afoul of the doct...

A district court ruled unconstitutional two Wyoming statutes that impose criminal and civil penalties for data collection on private land or public land accessed via private land. Environmental groups argued that the statutes violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. The court found th...

A district court vacated DOI's cancellation of an oil company's oil and gas lease in Montana. The company argued that cancellation after more than 30 years for a pre-lease NEPA violation that was never disclosed to the company was arbitrary and capricious. The court agreed, concluding that the agenc...

A district court denied an environmental group's motion for summary judgment challenging DOJ's withholding of legal memos concerning the president's authority to shrink national monuments under the Antiquities Act. The group argued that DOJ had no reasonable justification for withholding the memos a...

A Minnesota appellate court affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of a county's zoning ordinance that bans all industrial-mineral mining, including silica-sand mining. A silica-sand mining company argued that the ordinance discriminated against its business. But the lower court disagreed, concludin...

The D.C. Circuit granted in part and denied in part an environmental group's motion for summary judgment challenging DOJ's "Glomar response" refusing to confirm or deny the existence of the records requested. The group argued that the agency was not permitted to give this response to the group's FOI...

A district court denied BLM's motion to transfer a lawsuit over BLM's hydraulic fracturing rule from California to Wyoming. The agency argued that moving the lawsuit to Wyoming would avoid potentially conflicting legal precedents between the California and Wyoming district courts and that the Distri...

The Second Circuit vacated a rule published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indefinitely delaying a previously published rule that increased civil penalties for noncompliance with Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. Environmental groups argued that the agency violated pro...