Litigation

Standing for trees, redux

The Sunday Boston Globe includes this lengthy piece by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow on the revival of arguments first made in the 1970s that nature should be granted legal rights and perhaps even standing in court. USC law professor Chris Stone argued in a celebrated 1972 article that places like the Mineral King valley should be allowed …

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Water wars, eastern style

Those of us in the west have grown used to thinking of water wars as a regional specialty. But they happen in the east too. Florida, Alabama, and Georgia have been in court for nearly 20 years fighting over the waters of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River system, popularly known as the ACF. On Friday, a federal …

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Back to the future in northwest federal forests

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar today announced the withdrawal of the Bush administration’s last-minute revisions of the Northwest Forest Plan. Interior will also ask a federal court to vacate the 2008 modification of critical habitat for the northern spotted owl, and will review the 2008 spotted owl recovery plan, heavily criticized by outside scientists, which was …

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A Silver Lining to the Supreme Court Term for Environmentalists?

In assessing the environmental train wreck that was the just-concluded Supreme Court Term, the question arises: is there anything from that Term from which environmental interests can take comfort? The answer is at least a qualified “yes.” Somewhat lost in the attention focused on the justices’ five major environmental decisions–all of them clear defeats for …

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Corps proposes to require individual permits for mountaintop removal mining

Last month, the Obama administration announced an interagency agreement to develop a coordinated policy on mountaintop removal mining. Now the Army Corps of Engineers has taken the first step toward implementing that promise. The Corps has been permitting mountaintop mining through Nationwide Permit 21, a process that provides little opportunity for public input and environmental …

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Of judges and umpires

With the Senate about to begin hearings on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and major league baseball at the all-star break, thoughts turn naturally to the intersection of America’s Court and America’s pastime. That intersection, of course, lies at the question of whether the judge should play the same role in …

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Bush administration forest planning rules struck down — again

For much of the past decade, the Department of Agriculture regulations governing land and resource management planning in the national forests have been a kind of political ping-pong ball, bounced back and forth between administrations, and between the executive branch and the courts. Now the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has …

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Preble’s mouse jumps back into the courtroom

Five environmental groups — NRDC, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Native Ecosystems, and Biodiversity Conservation Alliance — have filed a lawsuit challenging FWS’s decision last year to list the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse (pictured) as threatened only in Colorado, leaving it off the protected list in Wyoming. FWS justified that distinction …

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An Invitation to Review the Supreme Court’s Environmental Record

This has been a blockbuster year in the U.S. Supreme Court for environmental law and policy. In the Term that concludes this month, the justices have decided five major environmental cases, involving many of the nation’s most important environmental laws. Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE), one of the sponsors of …

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Coeur Alaska and mountaintop removal mining

As Dan noted below, yesterday the Supreme Court decided its final environmental case of the year, Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. While Coeur Alaska was not a mountaintop removal case, it does have ramifications for the argument about whether the Clean Water Act allows mountaintop removal coal mining. The central issue in Coeur …

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