An Alaska court held that state law impliedly preempts a ballot initiative that would allow a local borough to prohibit the issuance of a permit for large-scale mines that would have a significant adverse impact on salmon-bearing waters. The court rejected the state's claim that the initiative, loca...

The Ninth Circuit held that BLM did not violate NEPA or FLPMA when it approved the expansion of a gold mine near Nevada's Mount Tenabo. Native American tribes claimed that BLM failed to address mitigation measures specific to groundwater in situ, failed to propose new mitigation measures relating to...

A district court vacated a 2008 rule issued by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) that governs the operation of coal mining activities near and through streams. The 2008 rule revised a 1983 rule, retaining the previous rule's stream buffer zone requirement, but establishi...

A district court held that a multibillion dollar judgment granted by an Ecuadorian court for environmental pollution in the Amazon was procured by fraud and therefore enjoined the attorney and two of his Ecuadorian clients from seeking to enforce that judgment in the United States. Upon consideratio...

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...

The Fifth Circuit upheld the dismissal of a landowner's suit against a chemical company for damages stemming from natural gas well operations. The company operated the well in the late 1960s and early 1970s under a mineral lease that expired in 1975. The lease granted the landowners the right to sue...