The court vacates and remands a district court decision that enjoined U.S. Forest Service timber harvesting in the National Forests of Texas due to on-the-ground Forest Service violations of the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). Because the NFMA does not provide for judicial review, the Adminis...
The court affirms a district court holding that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) for a flood control project on the Mississippi River satisfied the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The court first holds that the Corps' SEIS satisfied NEPA'...
The court affirms a district court decision that the U.S. Forest Service did not need to prepare an environmental assessment (EA) or an environmental impact statement (EIS) before adopting the policies and procedural rules that excluded certain types of categorical exclusions (CEs) for timber harves...
The court denies environmental groups' motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear weapon Stockpile Stewardship and Management (SSM) facilities, as well as activities or major upgrades to mission capability based on alleged violations of the National Env...
Despite the recent furor over the environmental damage threatened by the Republican-dominated 104th Congress, the so-called salvage logging bill—a rider on a budget-rescissions bill—so far is one of the few changes to environmental protection programs actually signed into law. One should not assume, however, that the logging rider's ability to survive a presidential veto means that it is an innocuous compromise.
The last 18 months have produced particularly interesting juridical and administrative pronouncements in the areas of Clean Water Act (CWA or Act) jurisdiction, permits, standards, citizen suits, and other enforcement. On the jurisdictional front, we learned that "deep ripping" constitutes an "addition" of a pollutant by a "point source." We also learned that 25-year-old cases from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C.
Since the enactment of the Clean Water Act (CWA or Act) 28 years ago, the federal courts have been called upon to sort out the respective roles of the federal and state governments in connection with numerous aspects of the statute's implementation and enforcement. Congress has superimposed an additional layer of complexity on the CWA experiment in creative federalism—the citizen suit provision.
Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc. may prove to be the most important environmental decision since Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Laidlaw's primary significance lies in its discussion of the injury component of the U.S. Supreme Court's now familiar three-part standing test.
In its first week of business during the new millennium, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., and provided important clarifications about the law of standing in environmental citizen suits. Specifically, the Court rejected the narrow view of environmental injury-in-fact advocated by Justice Scalia and instead adhered to the broader view of injury-in-fact established in a nonenvironmental context by the Court's decision in Federal Elections Commission v. Akins.
As law students frequently discover during exams, the law of standing is easy to state but hard to apply. The basic rules are simple and well-settled. Under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, in order to invoke federal jurisdiction, the plaintiff must demonstrate the existence of an "injury-in-fact" that is "legally cognizable," "fairly traceable" to the defendant, and capable of being "redressed" by the court. Each of the terms in quotation marks seems clear enough on the surface but has proved remarkably tricky in practice.