The Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling in a lawsuit concerning the U.S. government's and California's recovery of cleanup costs from a hazardous waste spill in the Sierra Nevada foothills that released toxic amounts of arsenic into local groundwater. Plaintiffs sued the company that had acq...
Over the past 50 years, tremendous progress has been made in reducing air pollution under the Clean Air Act. Nevertheless, while air quality has improved greatly for much of the nation, there are still places where the goal of attaining national standards has still not been reached. This is often true in urban locations that are affected by multiple pollution sources; typically, these areas are also environmental justice communities. Recent events have called attention to the urgent need for concrete action to address the many problems of these communities.
With a contentious presidential election looming amidst a pandemic, economic worries, and historic protests against systemic racism, climate action may seem less pressing than other challenges. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Tenth Circuit upheld a lower court ruling ordering mining and finance companies to comply with EPA's requests for information related to cleanup of a contaminated site in Utah. The companies argued that EPA exceeded its authority under CERCLA when it issued the information requests, the requests...
The Third Circuit held that a PRP's settlement with New Jersey resolving its state-law liability in connection with contamination at a municipal landfill did not protect the party from lawsuits seeking contribution toward expenditures made by EPA on the same site. The district court had concluded th...
The D.C. Circuit upheld EPA's 2018 decision to add a wheel-covering facility in Mississippi to the NPL. The company that assumed environmental liabilities for the facility argued that EPA improperly applied the hazard ranking system regulations to the site by failing to account for the company's mit...