The court preliminarily enjoins the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) from proceeding with a highway project that involves road construction and expansion through parkland. DOT prepared an environmental assessment (EA) and finding of no significant impact for the project instead of an environm...

The Court holds that a New York town's ordinance requiring all solid waste to be processed at a designated transfer station before leaving the town violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The avowed purpose of the ordinance is to retain the processing fees charged at the transfer stat...

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...