The Bureau of Reclamation's environmental impact statement for construction of the Strawberry Aqueduct and Collection System in Utah adequately fulfills the requirements of NEPA. The Strawberry System is a discrete major federal action, and not an integral or indivisible part of either the larger Bo...

A lower court's ruling that the Secretary of the Interior did not abuse his discretion in denying permission to build an oil drilling platform in the Santa Barbara Channel is vacated, and the case remanded. The plaintiff oil company is in error in claiming that any order of the Secretary which viola...

An injunction pending appeal prohibiting the Defense Department from spraying 10 million blackbirds in Kentucky and Tennessee with Tergitol, an experimental chemical designed to cause the birds' death from exposure, is dissolved. The decision of the district court below, denying a preliminary injunc...

The court enjoins, pending appeal, additional clearing of timber and shrubs on the remaining nine miles of a planned electrical transmission line corridor, but refuses to halt all further work on the project.
A dissent argues that all further work should be enjoined pending appeal since plaintiffs ...

The United States, rather than the Atlantic coastal states, has sovereign ownership right over the continental shelf and its seabed minerals lying seaward of the three-mile limit. Rejecting the defendant states' request that its prior decisions regarding the constitutional question of seabed ownersh...

A three-judge court rules that California regulations providing for a gradual reduction in airport noise levels are not per se invalid as intruding into a field of aircraft regulation, which is preempted to the federal government. The rules present several suggested means by which this reduction can...

In an action brought under §10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act and §§301 and 309(d) of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, a developer who dredged canals and filled marshes without a permit from the Corps of Engineers agrees, in a final consent judgment, to pay the United St...

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds the adequacy of the Department of the Interior's environmental impact statement for the sale of oil and gas leases on the Outer Continental Shelf along the coasts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The plaintiffs have failed to establish by a preponderan...

A federal district court has jurisdiction, under the precedent of Illinois v. City of Milwaukee, to determine whether the plaintiff has stated a federal common-law nuisance claim for which relief can be granted against the defendant for polluting tributaries of Lake Michigan. A private citizen who s...

The Supreme Court reverses a Fifth Circuit ruling that variances may be granted to individual sources under the Georgia implementation plan only if they meet the strict procedural and substantive requirements of §110(f) of the Clean Air Act. The court holds that EPA's construction of the Act permit...