A district court granted in part and denied in part motions to dismiss property owners' CERCLA contribution claims against a company for contamination stemming from a manufactured gas plant that the company's predecessor operated from the 1830s until the early 1900s. In 2010, some of the property ow...

A district court vacated and remanded the National Marine Fisheries Service's (NMFS') decision denying environmental and animal rights groups' petitions to list the porbeagle shark as endangered or threatened under the ESA. When NMFS receives a petition to list a species, it must make an initial fin...

The Ninth Circuit dismissed an environmental group's ESA and NEPA claims against FWS, the National Park Service (NPS), and the state of Montana in a case concerning the "helicopter hazing" of bison in Yellowstone National Park. To minimize disease transfer between wild bison and cattle in the Greate...

A New Jersey appellate court held that the state environmental agency exceeded its authority when it seized control of a privately owned landfill under an emergency order intended to abate an alleged imminent threat to the environment arising from continued emissions of hydrogen sulfide. The order e...

A district court held that the federal government may not regulate the take of the Utah prairie dog, a threatened species, on nonfederal lands under the ESA. In 2012, FWS issued a rule authorizing the take of the Utah prairie dog, via permit, on "agricultural lands, [private property] within [.5 mil...

A Washington State appellate court held that a county ordinance banning the land application of the most common class of biosolids is unconstitutional. The state' s biosolids program was created in 1992 to facilitate and encourage recycling, rather than disposal, of sewage waste, and the state's env...

The Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court's grant of summary judgment in favor of an energy construction company for whistleblower retaliation against an employee in a case concerning cleanup efforts of nuclear waste at the Hanford Nuclear site in Washington state. The “opt-out” provision of the ...