The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. Forest Service's Angora Fire Restoration Project in the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit (LTBMU) complies with the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) and NEPA. Environmental groups argued that the NMFA required the Forest Service to demonstrate at the project ...

The Tenth Circuit upheld the DOI Secretary's decision to rescind 77 oil and gas leases on federal land around national parks in Utah. BLM auctioned the oil and gas leases to energy companies in late 2008 during the last weeks of the George W. Bush administration. After the auction but before the lea...

The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. Forest Service's EIS for a forest thinning research project in the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest within the Deschutes National Forest complies with NEPA. The project allows logging and controlled burning on roughly 2,500 acres of the Forest to reduce the risk...

A New Jersey appellate court held that a town that acquired property containing a former landfill in an eminent domain action cannot require part of the condemnation award to be set aside for remediation purposes. The state's highest court has previously held that contaminated property acquired in a...

A Pennsylvania appellate court partially struck down Act 13, which pertains to oil and gas operations in the Marcellus Shale, as unconstitutional. The Act repealed Pennsylvania’s Oil and Gas Act and replaced it with a codified statutory framework regulating oil and gas operations in the Commonweal...

The Supreme Court of Wisconsin held that under state law, a town may not impose conditions on a livestock siting permit to protect surface and groundwater. The state legislature has strictly limited the ability of political subdivisions to regulate the livestock facility siting process. The town ove...

A district court held that the U.S. Forest Service violated NEPA, but not the NFMA, in approving the use of herbicides to control invasive plant species in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest comprises 2.3 million acres in the northeast corner of Oregon and the w...

The Ninth Circuit upheld a jury's award of $28.8 million in intangible environmental damages for harm caused by a wildfire negligently caused by a construction company that burned roughly 18,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest in Southern California. The company did not contest its liabil...

A Minnesota appellate court reversed a lower court decision permanently enjoining the construction of a 450-foot wireless-communications tower outside of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), a 1.1 million-acre wilderness area composed of federal and state lands in northeastern Minn...

The Ninth Circuit reversed in part and affirmed in part a lower court decision that U.S. Forest Service complied with NEPA and the APA when it amended the Sierra Nevada forest plan in 2004. In stark contrast to the 2001 EIS, which contained a 64-page detailed analysis of the environmental conseq...