Events
Not With a Bang, But With a Whimper…
As the current U.S. Supreme Court term winds down–the justices’ final opinions are due next week–attention begins to turn to the Court’s next session, scheduled to begin in October 2013. Until this week, the justices had one environmental law case on their docket for next year: U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council, No. 12-625. …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia Supreme Court Upholds Local Government Bans on Pot Dispensaries
In its most important land use decision since 2011, the California Supreme Court has upheld local governments’ power to ban marijuana dispensaries within their jurisdictions. Last week the court unanimously rejected marijuana advocates’ claim that such local bans are preempted by California state law. The Supreme Court’s opinion in City of Riverside v. Inland Empire …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental Justice, Metrics & California’s San Joaquin Valley
This week the California Environmental Protection Agency issued a disturbing but worthwhile report on environmental justice issues in California. That report confirms what many environmental justice advocates and state residents already assumed: that the San Joaquin Valley is–far and away–the most environmentally-challenged region of the state. According to the CalEPA press release accompanying the report, …
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CONTINUE READINGExxon Cares!
At this point, we don’t know much about Exxon’s oil spill near Mayflower, Arkansas — especially because Exxon doesn’t seem to want to let many people look at what’s going on. Twitter to the rescue! There’s an account called “Exxon Cares”, telling you all that you need to know, and…what’s that you say? That’s not …
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CONTINUE READINGA Unique Definition of “Interfaith”
Today in the mail appears an interesting program from the Wallage Stegner Center of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law: this coming Friday and Saturday, the Center will host “Religion, Faith, and the Environment” with lots of important guest speakers. Good on them. But then when I looked at the program, something …
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CONTINUE READINGU.S. Supreme Court Grants Review in Pacific Rivers Council Case
Today the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in a major forestry and NEPA case from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals: U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council, No. 12-623. The case will be argued and decided in the Court’s next (2013-14) Term. The issues the justices have agreed to consider in Pacific Rivers Council are threefold: …
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CONTINUE READINGNew Hope for Genetically-Engineered Food Labeling?
Many observers believed that the defeat of California’s Proposition 37 at the polls last November spelled a significant–and perhaps fatal–political setback for state and national efforts to require labeling of genetically engineered food products. But two recent articles from the New York Times suggest that the GMO labeling movement is far from dead. Last week …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Ever-Growing Crisis Over the Nation’s Nuclear Waste Non-Solution
The Associated Press reports that six underground storage tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State are leaking a witches’ brew of high-level nuclear wastes into the soil that threatens regional groundwater supplies. This news highlights a crisis of national proportions that has for too long gone unaddressed. Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalists Sue Over New Lake Tahoe Plan: Is the Perfect the Enemy of the Good?
The Sierra Club and a local neighborhood group recently sued the bistate Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, challenging TRPA’s just-adopted Regional Plan for the Lake Tahoe Basin. That development strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive. Let me briefly explain why. The Lake Tahoe Basin, which straddles the California-Nevada border, has since 1968 been governed under a bistate Compact negotiated …
CONTINUE READINGUniversity of Washington Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop
The University of Washington Law School has issued a call for papers for its 2nd Annual UW Young Environmental Law Scholars Workshop. The workshop will be held July 10-12, 2013, on the UW campus in Seattle. Here’s their description of the event: This collegial two-day workshop features discussion of works-in-progress by ten early career environmental …
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