The court holds that an 11-month period between the publication of a new statutory fee for unpatented mining claims and the compliance deadline afforded a claim holder a reasonable opportunity to comply with the deadline, and, thus, did not violate his procedural due process rights. Pursuant to the ...
The court holds that the owners of royalty interests in federal oil and gas leases are not entitled to royalty payments from their lessee. During ongoing title disputes over mineral patent rights between the federal government and several private parties, the lessee acquired both federal and private...
The court upholds an injunction requiring an ore processing plant owner to provide the U.S. Forest Service with access to the area surrounding his mill and precluding further operations until the Forest Service approves a new operating plant. The court first holds that the district court did not err...
The court holds that the Alaska mining commissioner permissibly nullified the mining rights acquired by a mining claims locator on state-selected federal lands. The court first holds that the commissioner did not err in finding that the locator was not qualified to conduct business in Alaska and, th...
The court reverses a district court summary judgment decision that ordered the owners of unpatented mill site claims in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona to remove themselves and all their things from the sites and to restore the sites to their natural condition. The government sought to evict th...
The court accepts and enters a consent decree between a citizen group and West Virginia's environmental agency that commits the agency to strengthen the application and oversight of the state's surface coal mining program authorized under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA). The g...
The last 18 months have produced particularly interesting juridical and administrative pronouncements in the areas of Clean Water Act (CWA or Act) jurisdiction, permits, standards, citizen suits, and other enforcement. On the jurisdictional front, we learned that "deep ripping" constitutes an "addition" of a pollutant by a "point source." We also learned that 25-year-old cases from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C.
Since the enactment of the Clean Water Act (CWA or Act) 28 years ago, the federal courts have been called upon to sort out the respective roles of the federal and state governments in connection with numerous aspects of the statute's implementation and enforcement. Congress has superimposed an additional layer of complexity on the CWA experiment in creative federalism—the citizen suit provision.
Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc. may prove to be the most important environmental decision since Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Laidlaw's primary significance lies in its discussion of the injury component of the U.S. Supreme Court's now familiar three-part standing test.
In its first week of business during the new millennium, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., and provided important clarifications about the law of standing in environmental citizen suits. Specifically, the Court rejected the narrow view of environmental injury-in-fact advocated by Justice Scalia and instead adhered to the broader view of injury-in-fact established in a nonenvironmental context by the Court's decision in Federal Elections Commission v. Akins.