The Seventh Circuit held that a lower court should have awarded a real estate firm double damages for harm caused by an oil company during its attempt to clean up pollution at gas stations in Michigan the firm leased to it. The firm filed a breach of contract claim and a waste claim for eight sites ...

The North Dakota Supreme Court held that the state owns the mineral interests under the shore zone of the Missouri River, which cuts through the oil-rich Bakken Shale region. Under the equal footing doctrine, the state's title to the beds of navigable waters extends from high watermark to high water...

A New Jersey appellate court, in an unpublished opinion, affirmed a trial court decision dismissing without prejudice property owners' complaint alleging their property had been contaminated by chemicals discharged from a neighboring dry cleaning business. The New Jersey Environmental Rights Act all...

The Federal Circuit, on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' temporary deviations from the water release rates set forth in an operating plan for the Clearwater Dam that caused increased flooding in Arkansas' Dave Donaldson Black River Wildlife Management A...

The D.C. Circuit held that so long as DOE has no viable alternative to Yucca Mountain as a depository for nuclear waste, it may not charge nuclear power plant operators an annual fee to cover the cost of that disposal. The court previously held that DOE violated its statutory obligation under the Nu...

A district court dismissed residents' lawsuit against a city for allowing a metals finishing plant to use and store acids and other dangerous chemicals. The residents' only factual allegation against the city is that it zoned the property at issue as a commercial or industrial use area and allowed t...

The Ninth Circuit held that the California Air Resource Board (CARB) low carbon fuel standard's regulation of ethanol does not facially discriminate against out-of-state commerce. CARB treats all ethanol within each regional category the same, and its decision to draw one of the regional categories ...

A Texas appellate court affirmed a lower court decision that commercial pecan growers suffered a regulatory taking when the Edwards Aquifer Authority—a water reclamation district—denied the growers' request for a water permit for one of their pecan orchards and granted a limited permit for a sec...