A district court ruled unconstitutional two Wyoming statutes that impose criminal and civil penalties for data collection on private land or public land accessed via private land. Environmental groups argued that the statutes violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. The court found th...

The Ninth Circuit affirmed a summary judgment rejecting a mining association's challenge to an Oregon law that prohibits the use of motorized mining equipment in rivers and streams containing essential salmon habitat. The association argued that the law was field preempted by the federal 1872 Mining...

The Fourth Circuit vacated both an incidental take statement issued by FWS and a right-of-way permit issued by the National Park Service (NPS) for construction of a natural gas pipeline that intersects the Blue Ridge Parkway. Environmental groups argued that the take limits set by FWS in its Inciden...

The Fourth Circuit vacated and remanded BLM's decision granting a right-of-way through federal land for construction of a pipeline and the U.S. Forest Service's decision to amend the Jefferson National Forest Land Resource Management Plan to accommodate the right-of-way and pipeline construction. En...

A Minnesota appellate court affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of a county's zoning ordinance that bans all industrial-mineral mining, including silica-sand mining. A silica-sand mining company argued that the ordinance discriminated against its business. But the lower court disagreed, concludin...

The D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court decision granting DOI's motion to dismiss an order compelling it to update the EIS for the federal coal management program. Environmental and community organizations claimed that the programmatic EIS (PEIS) for the program violated NEPA and the APA. They argue...

A Federal Claims court held that the Surface Transportation Board (STB) temporarily took landowners' property without just compensation for use as an interim trail under the National Trails System Act. The landowners' predecessors-in-interest sold right-of-way easements to a railroad for operation o...

A district court dismissed an environmental group's lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Congressional Review Act (CRA), under which Congress recently passed a resolution disapproving an FWS rule that prohibited certain hunting and trapping practices on National Wildlife Refuges in Alask...