The court holds that a trial court improperly excluded evidence central to a wool processing mill owner's case against the Finance Authority of Maine (FAME) under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) and contract law and, therefore, vacates and remands t...
The court dismisses a property owner's complaint alleging that a New York City watershed memorandum of agreement (MOA) and its regulations violated the U.S. Constitution, the state constitution, and state statutory and common law. The court first holds that the owner's claims that the MOA and its re...
The court reverses a district court dismissal of a property owner's takings claim against a county as unripe. The owner alleged that the county impermissibly listed her driveway as a county road and would not delist it because a neighbor used it to access a road and get mail. The district court held...
The court upholds in part and reverses in part a district court dismissal on forum non conveniens grounds of individuals' Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) suit alleging that a foreign oil company participated in human rights violations in Nigeria. The court first holds that the district court properly h...
The court affirms the dismissal of a hog farmer's complaint that alleged a taking of property by an Iowa city in violation of the Public Use Clauses of the U.S. and Iowa Constitutions. The farmer intended to use land bordering an airport for a hog manure lagoon. The city opposed the lagoon and recei...
The court holds that the exhaustion requirements of 43 C.F.R. §4.21(c) do not bar a district court from considering a colorable due process challenge to the procedures followed by the administrative law judge (ALJ) and the Interior Board of Indian Appeals (IBIA) in a pending Indian probate proceedi...
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—