A district court, in a 114-page opinion, held that a regional planning agency violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it approved the expansion of a ski resort near Lake Tahoe. The evidence fails to support the agency's finding that a reduced alternative was not economically infeasibl...

A district court held that the U.S. Forest Service violated its travel management rule, but not NEPA, when it issued its record of decision approving the Stanislaus National Forest Motorized Travel Management EIS. The agency looked at a reasonable range of alternatives to the proposed action, proper...

The Ninth Circuit upheld the U.S. Forest Service's adoption of the Idaho Roadless Rule, which creates different categories of land within Idaho's 9.3 million acres of inventoried roadless areas. The court affirmed and adopted as its own a lower court ruling that also approved the rule. FWS's biologi...

The Tenth Circuit affirmed a lower court decision dismissing environmental groups' case challenging decisions made by BLM and the Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLA) concerning the legality of 39 oil and gas leases in southern Utah. In the 1980s, the owner of the leases applied to have its oil and...

A California appellate court affirmed a lower court decision denying a conservation group's petition seeking to vacate a city's certification of an environmental impact report (EIR) for the development of a park. The group argued that the EIR wrongly defined the project to exclude pending residentia...

The U.S. Supreme Court held that government-induced flooding that is temporary in duration may constitute a takings and is not automatically exempt from Takings Clause inspection. The case arose after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers extended flooding from a dam into the Dave Donaldson Black River W...