A district court vacated and remanded the National Marine Fisheries Service's (NMFS') decision denying environmental and animal rights groups' petitions to list the porbeagle shark as endangered or threatened under the ESA. When NMFS receives a petition to list a species, it must make an initial fin...
The Ninth Circuit dismissed an environmental group's ESA and NEPA claims against FWS, the National Park Service (NPS), and the state of Montana in a case concerning the "helicopter hazing" of bison in Yellowstone National Park. To minimize disease transfer between wild bison and cattle in the Greate...
A district court held that the federal government may not regulate the take of the Utah prairie dog, a threatened species, on nonfederal lands under the ESA. In 2012, FWS issued a rule authorizing the take of the Utah prairie dog, via permit, on "agricultural lands, [private property] within [.5 mil...
The Ninth Circuit dismissed an oil company's Declaratory Judgment Act lawsuit against several environmental groups, seeking a declaration that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement’s approval of two oil spill response plans under OPA for Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas did not vi...
A district court granted summary judgment in favor of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on all but one claim in a lawsuit filed against the agency challenging its decision in 2013 to make certain "flow augmentation releases" (FARs) of water from a dam located in the Trinity River Division of the Centra...
A district court granted in part and denied in part motions for summary judgment in a case involving logging projects in the Flathead National Forest. In the case, environmental groups challenged the Forest Service's and FWS' authorization of the Glacier Loon Fuels Reduction and Forest Health Projec...
A district court upheld FWS' withdrawal of a proposed rule that would have listed the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species. Environmental groups challenged the decision, arguing that it failed to account for all of the statutory listing factors provided in the ESA, did not rely on the bes...