A district court denied Colorado's and Utah's request to vacate FWS' decision to list the Gunnison sage grouse species as threatened under the ESA. The states argued that many of the agency's claimed threats to the species were unsupported by science, and that its determinations were arbitrary and c...

A district court ruled in favor of fishermen's challenge to NMFS regulations regarding offshore aquaculture in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The fishermen argued that the regulations were facially invalid because they fall outside the agency's authority to regulate fisheries under the Magnus...

A district court issued a temporary restraining order on the scheduled opening of grizzly bear hunting in Idaho and Wyoming. A Native American tribe argued that FWS violated the ESA when it removed the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bear from the list of threatened species, and sought to rest...

A district court vacated and set aside FWS' 2015 decision not to list an isolated population of greater sage grouse as threatened under the ESA. The court's ruling follows an order previously issued by that court granting summary judgment when it concluded that the agency's decision was arbitrary an...

The Ninth Circuit reversed in part a district court's summary judgment that upheld FWS' decision not to list the arctic grayling as an endangered or threatened species under the ESA. Environmental groups argued that FWS erred in considering only the current range of the arctic grayling when determin...

The Ninth Circuit reversed in part and vacated in part a lower court decision granting summary judgment for a proposed logging project in areas of the Kootenai National Forest where two threatened species—the Canada lynx and the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear—are present. An environmental group argue...

A district court granted environmental groups' motion for summary judgment and required USDA's Wildlife Services to conduct a more thorough analysis of the potential impacts of its predator-killing operations before expanding those operations to game animals and protected species. Environmental grou...

The Ninth Circuit vacated a lower court's conviction of a man in Montana for killing a threatened grizzly bear in violation of the ESA. The man claimed that he was acting in self-defense when he killed the bear behind his home in May 2014. Applying an "objectively reasonable" standard to the man's e...

A district court denied motions to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the federal designation of over 1.8 million acres in the Sierra Nevada mountains as critical habitat for three amphibian species. Associations representing California ranchers and farmers who are no longer able to graze livestock on th...

A district court held that FWS' decision to withdraw its proposed listing of the "bi-state sage grouse" as threatened under the ESA was arbitrary and capricious. FWS recognized that one of the studies it relied on was questionable. In addition, FWS violated its own policy when it failed to offer any...