A district court denied summary judgment in a lawsuit concerning potential harms to local trout populations from a proposed copper and silver mine in Montana. Environmental groups and a Native American tribe argued that FWS violated the ESA by using a habitat surrogate to establish the mine's author...

The Fourth Circuit granted a motion to stay FWS' issuance of a biological opinion and incidental take statement for a proposed 300-mile natural gas pipeline running through Virginia and West Virginia, and to hold in abeyance litigation concerning authorization for the pipeline in order to allow FWS ...

In an unpublished opinion, the Ninth Circuit reversed in part and affirmed in part a summary judgment in favor of NMFS and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a challenge against NMFS' 2014 opinions that reversed its decades-long approach to classifying water diversions and hydroelectric dams on the...

The Ninth Circuit affirmed a district court order directing DOE to publish four energy conservation standards in the Federal Register. Environmental groups and states argued that an agency regulation known as the error-correction rule imposed upon DOE a nondiscretionary duty to publish the standards...

A district court dismissed a lawsuit brought by a Hawaiian resident alleging that an early start to a county construction project harmed two endangered species—the Hawaiian hawk and Hawaiian hoary bat—in violation of the ESA. The resident argued that the county violated its EIS by allowing const...

A district court vacated in part and remanded in part FWS' 2014 determination to remove the Rio Grande cutthroat trout from the ESA list of endangered and threatened wildlife. An environmental group argued that FWS failed to adequately explain why it used different methodologies in its 2008 and 2014...