The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (“AB 32”) set statewide goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. On November 30, 2015, the Supreme Court of California held in Center for Biological Diversity v. California Department of Fish and Wildlife that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) ...

In August 2016, the D.C. Circuit held that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) met its obligations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) but failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it issued an Incidental Take Permit (ITP) for the endangered Indiana bat. On the ...

Under the administrative law principle of Chevron deference, if the language of a statute is ambiguous, a court must defer to the agency’s interpretation of that language if the agency’s interpretation is reasonable. In Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Supreme Court evaluated an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision ...

Native American tribes in the Northwest once centered entire societies around the Columbia River, living on its shores and fishing salmon from its waters. Beginning in the 1930s, however, the United States built a series of hydroelectric dams on the river, flooding tribal villages and destroying traditional tribal access to ...

In People v. Rinehart, the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld a gold miner’s criminal conviction for using a suction dredge to mine the riverbed of a waterway on federal land in violation of a state moratorium on that mining method. The court reversed the California Court of Appeal’s holding that ...

In AquAlliance v. United States Bureau of Reclamation, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the United States Bureau of Reclamation’s (Bureau) decision to withhold information about the construction and location of water wells from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. However, the court ...

As 2016’s national election made clear, striking ideological differences between cities and their surrounding states exist in many parts of the country. One way in which this divide manifests itself is in state governments passing laws with the sole purpose of outlawing particular local conduct. For instance, recent state legislation ...

Farmland preservation has become an important pursuit for those seeking to protect the working landscape against conversion to nonagricultural use. One of the most common approaches for securing this protection is through the targeted use of agricultural conservation easements, typically perpetual land- use agreements designed to limit incompatible activities in ...