The court holds that the planning and proposal for routing a federally funded road through wooded public land alongside a public park violated neither §4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act (DOTA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), nor the Federal-Aid Highway Act (FAHA). Defendan...
The Court rules that condemnation of land for resale to private parties to abate the evils of an oligopoly of land ownership in Hawaii does not violate the Public Use Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Hawaii's history of feudal land tenure has left most of the residential land in the hands of a relativ...
The court holds that the Arizona Groundwater Management Act (Act) is constitutionally valid. The plaintiffs are landowners in an area of Arizona designated by the Act as an Active Management Area, which entails a prohibition on increased extraction of groundwater. They challenged the constitutionali...
In a products liability failure-to-warn suit, the court limits a prescription drug manufacturer's duty to warn to hazards known or reasonably knowable, and limits its holding in Beshada v. Johns-Manville Products Corp., 13 ELR 20533, an asbestos case, to that case's facts. Plaintiff's father, a phar...
The court rules that plaintiffs may recover damages in trespass for injuries caused by air pollution from defendant's smelter even though defendant was in compliance with state pollution laws and even though the construction of the smelter raised the market value of plaintiffs' land. Plaintiffs clai...
The court declines to modify a consent decree in a Clean Air Act enforcement case to exclude a private intervenor from certain notice provisions. The court first holds that the consent decree was not modified by an amendment to the Clean Air Act in 1981 which provided that a diversion of capital fro...
The court holds that challenges to the facial validity of Department of Justice (DOJ) guidelines for acting on requests for fee waivers under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) are not mooted by agencies' reversal of decisions not to grant specific waivers, and the challenges are ripe for review....
The court holds that a trailer park developer violated the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA) and the Rivers and Harbors Act (RHA) by draining and filling wetlands on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, without obtaining permits from the Army Corps of Engineers. The federal government brought th...
The court holds that current Clean Air Act (CAA) regulations enacted pursuant to CAA § 169A do not encompass federally enforceable measures to alleviate "regional haze," and thus the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) decision to take "no action" on those portions of Vermont's state implemen...
The court holds that chemical suppliers are not liable to the owner and operator of a wood treatment facility under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) or Arkansas's contribution law for the costs of cleaning up a contaminated holding pond. The court ho...