The court holds that individuals' Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and state-law claims against a gasoline corporation that spilled 600,000 gallons of gasoline onto the individuals' property and a surrounding lake and creek are not barred because the state has not engaged in a Comprehen...
The court issues a mandatoryinjunction against an oil company for extensive contamination of a river and surrounding land, but due to lack of evidence refuses to enjoin three other companies. The court first declines to invoke the doctrine of primary jurisdiction. The doctrine does not mandate blind...
The court holds that a company that allegedly sold the United States a lesser grade oil than required under contract specifications and then charged it for the higher grade oil is liable under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) for violating oil management regulations. The court first...
The court upheld in part and vacated in part U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) regulations, known collectively as the Land Disposal Restrictions (LDR) Phase IV rule, addressing residual or secondary materials generated in mining and mineral proc...
The court denies a petition for review of a final determination by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not to add 14 solvent wastes to its list of hazardous wastes under Subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The court first holds that EPA did not clearly err in interpr...
The court vacates a portion of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation in which it determined that oil-bearing wastewaters generated by the petroleum refining industry are solid wastes under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), but upheld EPA's determination that recove...
In discussions of the economies of the Mountain West, natural landscapes tend to be looked upon from either of two perspectives. The first is tied to the history of European settlement of the region. Natural landscapes are looked upon as the source of the natural resource raw materials that supply the region's "basic" industries: mining and metal processing, farming and ranching and the food processing associated with them, and timber harvest and the manufacturing based on it. The second view focuses more on the present and expected future.
On March 1, 1999, at 11:56 p.m. Pacific Coast time, the people of the United States took title to the Headwaters Forest, the largest remaining stand of privately owned, old growth redwoods in the world. Uncertain until the end, the transaction was recorded only minutes before the $250 million appropriation of federal funds for the purchase expired.
The February 2000 issue of the Environmental Law Reporter (ELR) carried an Article by Deputy Secretary of the Interior David J. Hayes relating the dramatic negotiations that led to the settlement of the Headwaters controversy, whereby the federal government agreed to buy the Pacific Lumber Company's (PALCO's) Headwaters Forest, a 7,500-acre tract of old growth redwood trees, in order to preserve it as a national park. Though I was one of the lawyers for PALCO, and thus my perspective of this affair understandably differs from Mr.
From the enactment of the National Park Service Organic Act (the Organic Act or the Act) in 1916 until a 1998 decision by a federal district court in Utah, the National Park Service (NPS) had managed national parks without resolving theseeming contradiction between the Act's directive to conserve park resources "unimpaired" and its simultaneous directive to provide for visitors' "enjoyment" of those resources. Uncertainty, confusion, and disputes about the inevitably conflicting implications of these mandates were virtually guaranteed by the text of the Act, which requires the NPS to—