The court holds that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) does not apply to the Secretary of the Interior's designation of critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The court first holds that an Oregon county has standing to challenge the Secretary's failure to comply with NEP...

On remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, the court holds inadmissible under Fed. R. Evid. 702 expert testimony offered to prove that plaintiffs' mothers' ingestion of the drug Bendectin during pregnancy caused the plaintiffs to be born with limb-reduction birth defects. The court first refuses to rema...

The court holds that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims lacked jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. §1500 over a manufacturer's claim for compensation under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for response costs the manufacturer incurred cleaning up contaminated groundwater pursuant to a U.S. Enviro...

The court holds that a New Jersey landowner adequately stated a substantive due process claim under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when he alleged that a local zoning board arbitrarily or irrationally decided that the operation of a battery distribution business on his property vi...

The court affirms a district court order denying citizen groups a preliminary injunction to stop ocean dumping of dioxin-contaminated materials dredged from the New York-New Jersey Port Authority's Newark/Port Elizabeth facility. The court first holds that the plain meaning of the U.S. Environmental...

The court holds that Wyoming hunting license regulations do not violate the Takings and Equal Protection Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. The regulations create separate pools for allocating licenses to residents and nonresidents and limit owners of 160 or more acres to two supplemental licenses. T...

A district court denies property owners' motions to sanction the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for violating discovery orders in the owners' toxic-tort suit against DOE contractors that operate the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility. The court also denies, for the most part, the contr...

The court holds that most of the final environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed highway realignment through Hatton Canyon near Carmel-by-the-Sea in California satisfies the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The court then address...

The court denies the federal government's motion for summary judgment in a case where a farmer alleged that the government took his property without just compensation by ordering the farmer to cease operation of a drainage system and restore his property to its prior condition as wetlands. The court...

The court affirms a district court's dismissal for failure to join indispensable parties to a Native American tribe's claims challenging the U.S. Department of the Interior's (DOI's) methods for calculating funding the tribe receives under its tribal self-governance compact. In 1988, the tribe enter...