The Ninth Circuit held that shareholders may go forward with their lawsuit against an oil company for allegedly making false and misleading statements about the condition of Alaskan pipelines and the company's pipeline maintenance and leak detection practices prior to and in the wake of an oil spill...
The Ninth Circuit affirmed two lower court decisions ordering an oil company to produce expert witness documents for use in a foreign proceeding concerning an environmental contamination dispute in Ecuador. The court rejected the company's argument that the documents were presumptively immune from d...
A Michigan appellate court held that Mich. Admin. Rule 324.102(x), which defines the term “injection well,” does not include wells completed using hydraulic fracturing. Accordingly, "frack" wells are not subject to the environmental regulations applicable to injection wells. For a well to be cat...
A district court held that a Nebraska law passed in 2012 to expedite the approval of a new route for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline through the state is unconstitutional. Article IV, §20, of the Nebraska Constitution commits exclusively to the Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC) the au...
The Supreme Court of Missouri reversed and remanded a lower court decision that a proposed ordinance that would impose additional sales taxes to pay for a light rail system in Kansas City, Missouri, violates the state constitution. The case arose after a community activist sought to place the ordina...
A district court held that an insurance company may go forward with its CERCLA claim against several refrigerator waste oil companies for reimbursement of payments it incurred following a hazardous waste spill by its insured. In Chubb Custom Insurance Co. v. Space Systems/Loral Inc., 710 F.3d 946, 4...
A district court held that EPA mostly complied with a think tank's FOIA request seeking information related to former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's use of a secondary email account. EPA produced over 10,000 records in response to the request and moved for summary judgment. The think tank opposed ...
The Seventh Circuit held that a lower court should have awarded a real estate firm double damages for harm caused by an oil company during its attempt to clean up pollution at gas stations in Michigan the firm leased to it. The firm filed a breach of contract claim and a waste claim for eight sites ...