The court upheld a lower court decision dismissing an environmental service company's patent infringement suit against a hazardous waste remediation contractor. The contractor was hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to clean up a lead-contaminated parcel of land near Colonie, New York. The com...
The Seventh Circuit upheld the dismissal of landowners' takings claim against a city for allowing their land to become flooded due to city-owned stormwater detention ponds and a wastewater treatment facility. The flooding transformed their land from farmland to wetlands. The landowners filed an inve...
The Second Circuit upheld the dismissal of rescue, search, and cleanup workers' substantive due process complaint against federal officials for knowingly issuing false statements about air quality safety in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of the World Trade Center. The wor...
The Federal Claims Court denied the U.S. government's motion to dismiss property owners' takings claims against it in connection with a U.S. Army Corps of Engineer's project along the shore of Lake Michigan. The owners claimed that the Corps' construction and maintenance of jetties from 1950 to 1989...
The court held that General Statutes §22a-196, which prohibits the operation of asphalt batching and continuous mix facilities within one-third of a mile from any hospital, nursing home, school, area of critical environmental concern, watercourse, or residential area, does not violate the due proce...
A district court held that a county ordinance that bans the land application of "Los Angeles sludge" in the unincorporated areas of the county violates the Commerce Clause. The city of Los Angeles generates a large amount of sewage treatment residues, some substantial portion of which it would shi...
A district court dismissed international shipping entities' lawsuit seeking to invalidate Michigan's Ballast Water Statute, which is aimed to prevent the introduction of aquatic nuisance species into the Great Lakes. The statute requires all oceangoing vessels to obtain permits from the state if the...
The Ninth Circuit upheld the U.S. Forest Service's ban on rock climbing on Cave Rock, a large rock formation on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. While the formation holds religious and cultural significance to a Native American tribe, the ban had a secular purpose and had no impermissible re...
The Eleventh Circuit reversed and remanded a lower court decision allowing a chicken plant owner's equal protection claims against various state and local officials to go forward. The owner filed a §1983 suit against the officials on the theory that they violated the owner's constitutional righ...
The court upholds the denial of a church's motion for a preliminary restraining order to prevent the relocation of a cemetery in conjunction with plans to renovate Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Eminent domain does not constitute a "land use" regulation subject to the Religious Land Use and...