The court holds that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not violate the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it issued a permit to a developer that planned to fill wetlands for a mixed use development project in Los Angeles County, California, and, therefore, vacated a district court's in...
The court holds that the owners and operators of public water systems in California violated the national primary drinking water regulations for microbiological contaminants, lead, and copper contained in the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and holds them individually liable for those violations. The...
In Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly upheld orders issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pursuant to §§113(a)(5) and 167 of the Clean Air Act (CAA or Act), prohibiting construction of a new power generator unit at a mine in Northwest Alaska.
The D.C. Circuit remanded an EPA rule that retroactively altered allowances for controlling the production, import, and export of hydrochlorofluorocarbons that had been allowed under prior regulations. A 2003 rule allowed both inter-pollutant and intercompany transfers of allowances, but in the 2010...
A district court held that an environmental group's claims against an electric company for violating PSD requirements before making major modifications to one of its plants are time barred, but it stayed final entry of the judgment pending the ruling of the Seventh Circuit in a similar case. PSD obl...
The court holds that a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation that creates a 12-month grace period exempting transportation projects in nonattainment and maintenance areas from Clean Air Act (CAA) §176(c) is contrary to the plain meaning of the CAA. The court first holds that an envi...
The court affirms the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) decision to redesignate the Cleveland-Akron-Lorain, Ohio, area as a Clean Air Act (CAA) attainment area for ozone. The court first holds that an organization of manufacturers and local governments from the Pittsburgh-Beaver Valley,...
The court holds that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) adoption of a rule requiring compliance assurance monitoring (CAM) of major emission sources complies with the Clean Air Act (CAA) §114(a)(3)'s enhanced monitoring requirements. The court first holds that EPA's adoption of CAM ...
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.