A California appellate court upheld a lower court decision finding that a manufacturer's product—automobile touch up paint—is exempt from the warning requirements of the California Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, commonly known as Proposition 65. Because the paint contained toluen...
A California appellate court reversed a lower court's award of damages in a cotton grower's suit against a neighboring oil company alleging subsurface trespass due to the migration of wastewater stemming from the company's oil production activities. The wastewater, pumped out of the deep ground in c...
The Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded certain lower court pretrial orders that excluded government witnesses and studies in a case concerning the release of asbestos-contaminated vermiculite at a mine. The lower court exceeded its authority by ordering the government to produce a pretrial list of ...
The court reverses and remands a jury verdict awarding damages to a logging company that alleged that the state caused a temporary taking by refusing to permit logging on a parcel of the company's property on which a pair of northern spotted owls were nesting. The court first holds that because of t...
The court holds that a town's decision to rezone a landowner's property from residential to solely recreational use did not constitute a regulatory taking under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The court first rejects the landowner's contention that the town must demonst...
The court holds that the failure of the United States to regulate the passage of a ship carrying nuclear waste through waters in the U.S. exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is not a major federal action. Therefore, the court dismisses an environmental group's National Environmental Policy Act claims agai...
The court holds that although a state department of transportation is technically liable under the Washington Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA) for the disposal of a tank car at a Superfund site, the department need not pay remedial action costs to a group of utilities that cleaned up the site. The de...
The court holds that under Delaware law, a tort claimant that was fraudulently induced to release another from liability may rescind the release or may file a separate suit for fraud. A Florida nursery entered a settlement agreement that released a Delaware corporation from future liability. Subsequ...
The court holds that the doctrine of res judicata does not bar nuclear utilities' claims that they were improperly charged by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for decontamination and decommissioning costs in its contracts for enriched uranium during the time period after the Energy Policy Act ena...
The court dismisses as unripe a developer's civil rights action against a city, a state environmental protection agency, agency employees, and a citizen group that allegedly opposed the developer's construction of a residential subdivision within the city's watershed. The court first holds that the ...