A New Jersey appellate court held that a town that acquired property containing a former landfill in an eminent domain action cannot require part of the condemnation award to be set aside for remediation purposes. The state's highest court has previously held that contaminated property acquired in a...

A Pennsylvania appellate court partially struck down Act 13, which pertains to oil and gas operations in the Marcellus Shale, as unconstitutional. The Act repealed Pennsylvania’s Oil and Gas Act and replaced it with a codified statutory framework regulating oil and gas operations in the Commonweal...

The Supreme Court of Wisconsin held that under state law, a town may not impose conditions on a livestock siting permit to protect surface and groundwater. The state legislature has strictly limited the ability of political subdivisions to regulate the livestock facility siting process. The town ove...

A district court held that the U.S. Forest Service violated NEPA, but not the NFMA, in approving the use of herbicides to control invasive plant species in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest comprises 2.3 million acres in the northeast corner of Oregon and the w...

The Ninth Circuit upheld a jury's award of $28.8 million in intangible environmental damages for harm caused by a wildfire negligently caused by a construction company that burned roughly 18,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest in Southern California. The company did not contest its liabil...