The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multistate Litigation consolidated and transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana 77 lawsuits related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The actions indisputably share factual issues concerning the cause (or causes) ...
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 denies two Missouri cities' petition to review the Surface Transportation Board's approval of restoration train service over an unused 278-mile railroad line without performing an environmental assessment (EA) under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The cities argued that the propose...
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...