Endangered Species Act

It’s Not Waste, It’s An Ecosystem

Letting rivers flow supports ecosystems and people

One thing that droughts in the West provoke are political battles over water.  The drought that California is currently in is no exception.  Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have just passed a bill that would – more or less – exempt farmers in the Central Valley from environmental laws like the Endangered Species …

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Pine Beetles, Environmental Law, and Climate Change Adaptation

Inflexible laws may be the best response to climate change

Anyone who lives or has visited the Intermountain West over the past decade or so has noticed the devastating impact of a mountain pine beetle epidemic on the pine forests from Arizona and New Mexico all the way up to British Columbia and Alberta.  As a result of warmer winter weather because of climate change, …

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U.C. Davis’ “ESA at 40” Conference Now Available for Online Viewing

The federal Endangered Species Act turned 40 this past weekend. On December 28, 1973, then-President Richard Nixon signed into law what has proven to be the nation’s most controversial environmental law. So it’s an especially appropriate time to alert Legal Planet readers that a major, recent conference on the ESA sponsored by the U.C. Davis …

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Is Missouri v. Holland in the Court’s crosshairs?

Justices look for limits on Treaty Power in domestic dispute case

The headline environmental cases at the Supreme Court this term are of course about the Clean Air Act, specifically about its application to cross-state pollution (as Dan has explained here) and to greenhouse emissions (as Ann has addressed here and here). But sometimes cases that at first glance seem wholly unrelated to the environment could …

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U.C. DAVIS LAW SCHOOL CONVENES “ESA AT 40” CONFERENCE

U.C. Davis School of Law’s California Environmental Law & Policy Center to host major conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the federal Endangered Species Act

This Friday, October 4th, the U.C. Davis School of Law’s California Environmental Law & Policy Center (CELPC) will convene a major conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the federal Endangered Species Act. “The ESA at 40: Examining Its Past and Exploring Its Future” will bring to King Hall a broad array of ESA experts, including …

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De-Extinction Conference

Last month, I participated in a conference on the topic of de-extinction — efforts to resurrect all or part of the genome of extinct animals. The goal would be to have something very much akin to the wooly mammoth or the passenger pigeon, perhaps released into the wild. (And no, this isn’t going to work …

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Good environmental data matters for environmental litigation

If you aren’t reading Dave Owen’s blog posts over at Environmental Law Prof Blog, you should be.  His most recent post is about a recent Endangered Species Act (ESA) case in Texas: Environmental plaintiffs sued, arguing that the state of Texas had allowed too many water withdrawals upstream from the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, a critical breeding …

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D.C. Circuit Affirms Polar Bear Listing

In an opinion released earlier today, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected challenges to the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  Read the full opinion, In re: Polar Bear Endangered Species Act Listing and Section 4(d) Rule Litigation – MDL No. 1993.  Holly has discussed …

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On “pretextual” listings of species for protection under the Endangered Species Act

The folks over at Pacific Legal Foundation’s (PLF) blog have been nice enough to post about an article that I co-authored with Berry Brosi at Emory University (paywall protected, unfortunately!). The article investigates the role that citizen petitions and citizen suits play in the process of listing species for protection under the Endangered Species Act …

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Obama Administration Proposes Merging NOAA’s Endangered Species Act Functions Into Department of the Interior

As reported in today’s Wall Street Journal, President Obama has proposed a major government reorganization merging into a single, cabinet-level agency federal trade and commerce responsibilities currently dispersed among a number of different agencies and departments. These reforms, which would require the consent of Congress to implement, would increase government efficiency and reduced federal expenditures. …

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