The district court remands to state court two state-law toxic tort claims brought against a landfill's owners and those who contributed to its waste by individuals who alleged that hazardous and toxic substances from the landfill caused injury or death. The court first holds that one landfill contri...

The Ninth Circuit upheld FWS' decision to end its 1987 sea otter translocation program. FWS created an experimental reserve population of southern sea otters some distance from the main population, but in 2012, FWS deemed the program a failure and terminated it. FWS' interpretation of the statute al...

The D.C. Circuit dismissed a mining company's lawsuit challenging EPA's decision to place the entire Bonita Peak Mining District, located in Colorado's Mineral Belt, on the NPL. The mining company owns a mine located in the district, but its mine was not one of the sites scored under the hazard rank...

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...

The Sixth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision dismissing residents' NEPA lawsuit against the National Park Service (NPS) concerning its approval of a scenic trailway through the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan. One of the alternative routes for the trailway, which NPS proposed...

A district court upheld the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS') decision to waive the legal requirements of NEPA, ESA, and CZMA for two border wall construction projects in San Diego, California. DHS made its waiver determination under §102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant ...

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 The order requires executive branch agencies to identify two existing regulations to be repealed for every new regulation,...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 ...

A district court held that San Francisco and Oakland, California, may not remove back to state court their climate change public nuisance actions against several oil companies. The defendants—the largest cumulative producers of fossil fuels worldwide—timely invoked federal common law as a ground...

The court holds that a New York state court declaratory judgment requiring the owner of a contaminated site to indemnify the former owner of the site for all environmental costs arising from the current owner's purchase is sufficiently final to be given preclusive effect in federal court despite the...