The Seventh Circuit held that the state of Illinois would be violating the U.S. Constitution if it confiscated any part of a clean energy foundation's assets. After the state legislature passed an authorizing statute, the foundation was created out of the profits from a private company's sale of sev...

The Fifth Circuit reversed a district court's denial of a motion to compel attendance and produce documents and its quashing of a subpoena directed to a non-party witness in a class action suit alleging that oil companies cooperated with and assisted the Nigerian military in the brutal repression of...

The Fourth Circuit held that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency inspectors who took wastewater samples at a mill are entitled to qualified immunity. The owner of the mill had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the wastewater under the circumstances shown in the record and therefore had no Fou...

A California appellate court held that the statute of limitations governing the filing of a petition for administrative mandamus challenging a decision of the state's Board of Forestry and Fire Protection is found in California Public Resources Code §4601.3. Consequently, a petition for a writ ...

The Ninth Circuit upheld the Secretary of Commerce's decision to allocate a portion of the U.S. harvest of Pacific whiting to the Makah Indian Tribe. Because the "best available scientific information" supports a sliding scale method of allocation, the National Marine Fisheries Service's (NMFS') rel...

A California appellate court reversed a lower court's denial of a developer's petition to overturn an adverse decision by a local planning commission due to an unacceptable probability of actual bias on the part of one of the decisionmakers. While this matter was pending before the planning commissi...

The Ninth Circuit reversed a lower court's denial of a Native American tribe's motion to reopen a 1981 judgment that denied the tribe treaty fishing rights on the ground that the tribe had not maintained an organized tribal structure. In 1996 the tribe became federally recognized, and the lower cour...

A California appellate court held that a local airport commission's adopting of an airport land use compatibility plan was a "project" under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Adoption of the plan was a project because it has the potential to result in physical change to the environmen...

A California appellate court held that maintenance work done on a levee to protect an island in the Delta in San Joaquin County from flooding was not a public works project subject to the prevailing wage laws. The work did not involve the operational work of a reclamation district, nor is there any ...

The Fifth Circuit held that a local ordinance that prevents a corporation that owns state-granted mineral interests under and around a lake from drilling within 1,000 feet of that lake is preempted by Louisiana's comprehensive regulation of oil and gas drilling. The ordinance, therefore, is invalid ...