A district court held that a research institute must turn over documents relating to its methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) study to one of the plaintiffs in a consolidated multidistrict case against several gasoline companies for groundwater contamination stemming from their use of MTBE in gasoline...
A Louisiana appellate court reversed a lower court decision denying property owners' right to sue oil and gas companies for contamination and damages due to their past operations on the site. The operations were conducted under mineral leases that remain active today. The owners purchased the site i...
The Ninth Circuit denied a petition for review of a FERC order approving the construction of new facilities to allow for the flow of natural gas from Mexico northbound into southern California. FERC's EIS contained a reasonably thorough discussion of the environmental impact of its actions based on ...
A district court largely denied a tribe's motions for summary judgment on claims that the BLM violated NEPA and FLPMA in approving a gold mining and processing operation on and around Mt. Tenabo in Lander County, Nevada. The Ninth Circuit already issued a preliminary injunction requiring the BLM to ...
A district court denied Louisiana's motion to remand to state court its lawsuit against BP for damages stemming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Louisiana originally filed the complaint in state court, asserting only a cause of action under state law and specifically stating that it "does not p...
The court affirms a state water court decision denying and dismissing with prejudice a county's applications for decrees for conditional water rights for a large water storage project west of the Continental Divide in the Upper Gunnison River Basin. The county argued that the basin contained ample w...
The court reverses a portion of a state environmental agency order that imposed a civil penalty against a city for discharging sewage sludge without a permit in violation of an Oregon statute. The city was granted a national pollutant discharge elimination system (NPDES) permit to operate a sewage d...
The court grants a county's motion for summary judgment in a case in which a community association challenged the county's receipt of a state nontidal wetlands permit for the planned construction of a roadway extension. The court first holds that the association failed to raise any genuine issues of...
The court holds that a Colorado statute that exempts from taxation certain possessory interests in tax-exempt property violates the state constitution. A ski area operator, whose ski resort is located on federal land, filed suit challenging the appraisal of its owed taxes on the basis that taxation ...
The court vacates and remands a district court's order issued after an Endangered Species Act case brought by an environmental group against a lumber company had been declared moot. The district court granted the lumber company's motion to dismiss the case as moot but then issued an opinion outlinin...