A district court vacated FWS' final rule designating approximately 187,157 square miles in Alaska and adjacent territorial and U.S. waters as critical habitat for the polar bear, ruling that the designation "went too far and was too extensive." Although the final rule is valid in many respects, the ...

The Ninth Circuit upheld the U.S. Forest Service's adoption of the Idaho Roadless Rule, which creates different categories of land within Idaho's 9.3 million acres of inventoried roadless areas. The court affirmed and adopted as its own a lower court ruling that also approved the rule. FWS's biologi...

The Tenth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision dismissing environmental groups' case challenging decisions made by BLM and the Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLA) concerning the legality of 39 oil and gas leases in southern Utah. In the 1980s, the owner of the leases applied to have its oil and...