standing

One Reason the Election Matters for the Environment: The Supreme Court

Supreme Court appointments are among the most durable of Presidential actions.  A fifty-year-old appointee could well be on the Supreme Court until 2040 or longer. As an AP story this morning points out, the election could dramatically change the balance on the Supreme Court: With four justices in their seventies, odds are good that whoever is …

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Ninth Circuit Rules Against Indian Tribe’s Climate Change Suit

Not much of a surprise here; a Ninth Circuit panel “has ruled against the northwest Alaska village of Kivalina, which sued energy companies over claims that greenhouse emissions contributed to global warming that is threatening the community’s existence.”  The village brought a common-law public nuisance claim against the oil companies, but the panel held that …

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Could standing save CEQA?

One of the recent complaints about CEQA has been that the statute has been abused by various parties who have no interest in protecting the environment, but instead are simply interested in either (a) raising costs for competitors or (b) using the threat of CEQA litigation to extract payments from project proponents.  Various horror stories …

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The Supreme Court on Climate Torts — A Second Look

Let’s begin with the bad news.  The plaintiffs lost, eliminating one possible tool in combating climate change.  That doesn’t seem like a big loss to me, because I’ve always thought that the defendants’ best argument was that the federal common law is displaced by the Clean Air Act.  It’s an easy argument to make based …

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Ninth Circuit allows landowner to challenge impaired water listing

UPDATED. See below. An odd judicial couple, conservative Jay Bybee (of torture memo fame) and liberal Stephen Reinhardt, have combined to issue an even odder Clean Water Act standing decision. In Barnum Timber v. EPA they ruled, over the dissent of District Judge James Gwin, sitting by designation, that a landowner had standing to challenge …

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U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Climate Change Nuisance Case

The 2010-2011 U.S. Supreme Court case promises to be a blockbuster one for environmental law.  The Court today announced that it had granted a petition for certiorari filed in AEP v. Connecticut (the lower court decision in the case is here).  The case, brought by  a number of states against the country’s five larges utilities , …

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The Long Environmental Shadow of Palsgraf

Palsgraf is a case known to every American law student.  It involves a bizarre accident: a train employee negligently caused a passenger to drop his bag, which contained fireworks, which went off, which caused freight scales at the other end of the platform to fall over, which hit Mrs. Palsgraf and caused her emotional distress.  …

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