The Third Circuit held that a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers complied with NEPA, the CWA, and the CZMA in its decision to deepen the main channel of the Delaware River by five feet. The Corps' 2009 EA was neither arbitrary nor capricious. The Corps complied with the procedural requirements prescribed ...
A district court held that the U.S. Forest Service violated NEPA, but not the NFMA, in approving the use of herbicides to control invasive plant species in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest comprises 2.3 million acres in the northeast corner of Oregon and the w...
A district court vacated and remanded BLM's resource management plan and EIS for the Roan Plateau Planning Area in Colorado. BLM considered a number of alternatives in its NEPA analysis, but ultimately decided to permit the leasing of 100% of the plateau for oil and gas drilling subject to vario...
The Ninth Circuit reversed in part and affirmed in part a lower court decision that U.S. Forest Service complied with NEPA and the APA when it amended the Sierra Nevada forest plan in 2004. In stark contrast to the 2001 EIS, which contained a 64-page detailed analysis of the environmental conseq...
The Fourth Circuit held that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer violated NEPA when it issued a CWA §404 permit allowing a developer to build a mooring facility and boat ramp 3,000 feet from the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Corps' EA, issued contemporaneously w...
The Fifth Circuit dismissed environmental groups' petitions challenging DOI's approval of 16 oil well exploration and development plans that were issued between March 29 and May 20, 2010, under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA). The groups argued that the agency failed to consider th...
The D.C. Circuit held unripe an oil and natural gas association's petition for review challenging a 2008 EPA regulation deregulating many hazardous secondary materials under RCRA. The association argued that EPA erred in not including in the deregulation a category of hazardous secondary materia...
The D.C. Circuit vacated NRC rulemakings concerning the temporary storage and permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Four states, an Indian community, and a number of environmental groups filed a petition for review challenging NRC's "waste confidence decision" (WCD), which, among other thing...
A district court held that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) did not violate NEPA or the ESA when it accepted over 300 bids for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon disaster. An environmental group argued that the ag...