The Department of Transportation (DOT) has become the first federal agency to establish procedures, in the absence of specific statutory authority, for providing financial assistance to indigent participants in administrative proceedings.¹ On January 13, DOT announced the beginning of a one-year demonstration funding program² for participants in selected National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) rulemaking and adjudicatory proceedings under the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966.³ T

Overturning a three-year-old decision, the United States Supreme Court on January 12 declared that ownership disputes concerning the beds of intrastate navigable water henceforth must be decided as a matter of state law, rather than federal common law. Oregon ex rel. State Land Board v.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that New York City must implement and enforce four transportation control strategies contained in the New York air quality implementation plan.¹ In a citizens suit brought by several environmental groups and individuals under §304 of the Clean Air Act seeking enforcement of the plan, the court held that the city was precluded from raising constitutional defenses based on the Tenth Amendment as recently construed by the Supreme Court in National League of Cities v.

More than three years after passage of the Endangered Species Act,¹ the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has proposed regulations² to implement §7,³ one of the strongest statutory mandates for environmental protection presently on the books.⁴ Less than two weeks after the §7 regulations were proposed, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision strictly enforcing §7's mandate.

Partially resolving a protracted series of inconsistent decisions among the circuits,¹ the Supreme Court on February 23, 1977 held in E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. v. Train² that §301 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (FWPCA)³ authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to promulgate regulations establishing uniform, single-number, industrywide effluent limitations for existing dischargers, provided some allowance is made for variations in individual plants.

In a decision with possible serious implications for the Department of the Interior's program to accelerate oil and gas production from the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), Federal District Judge Jack B.

An emotional debate, heretofore waged in scientific journals¹ and university communities, has now moved to congressional hearing rooms. The debate concerns the potentially beneficial but perhaps hazardous technique of recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) research, in which DNA molecules—the genetic material of every cell that transmits an organism's hereditary characteristics—are chemically cut and then recombined into new molecules.

On April 5, 1977,¹ the House of Representatives passed a bill which would severely limit the federal government's authority to regulate the dredging and filling of wetlands. H.R. 3199 renews a number of funding authorizations under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA), including the multi-billion-dollar grant program for construction of municipal sewage treatment facilities.

On March 31, 1977, federal Judge James B. McMillan of the Western District of North Carolina declared the Price-Anderson Act,¹ which limits total liability for damages from accidents involving civilan nuclear power reactors, to be an unconstitutional deprivation of due process and equal protection. Judge McMillan's decision in Carolina Environmental Study Group v. United States Atomic Energy Commission,² is certain to elate opponents of nuclear power development, who view Price-Anderson as the fulcrum of nuclear power issues.

To the apparent dissatisfaction of all the parties involved, the Supreme Court on May 2, 1977, refused to resolve the issue of whether the Clean Air Act empowers the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to require states under pain of federal enforcement sanctions to implement EPA-drafted transportation controls as part of their air quality implementation programs.