Articles

This week is the calm before the storm of filings next week (and who knows what decisions!). Environmental Law – Judicial Review On Wednesday, PLF filed an amicus brief in the District Court of Minnesota in Hawkes Co., Inc. v. United States Army Corp of Engineers. This is only the second court to address judicial … ...

Today attorneys with Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) filed a complaint against Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and other federal authorities because they failed to respond to PLF’s petition to reclassify five species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).  The lawsuit is yet another case in which the federal government did not comply with th ...

Pacific Legal Foundation successfully sued the Fish and Wildlife Service last year to force the agency to act on a petition to delist the Valley Elderberry Longhorn Beetle, which has been protected as a threatened species since 1980 but which, since at least 2006, has been deemed to have recovered.  In October of last year, … ...

Last month, I gave the David Saurman Provocative Lecture at San Jose State University, about how licensing restrictions, and particularly CON laws, bar innovation and entrepreneurship. I focused in particular on my recent litigation against Missouri’s licensing law. You can watch my talk here. (I can’t link it directly, so you’ll ...

I’ll be joining Armstrong & Getty in about five minutes to talk about California’s absurd Unfair Competition Law–and why you can get sued for faking a movie review. You can listen online here. I mentioned Justice Brown’s opinion in the San Remo Hotel case. You can read that here–just scroll down to her dissenting ...

Professor Shi-Ling Hsu of the Florida State University College of Law has posted the essay A Conservative Approach to Environmental Law: Be Data Driven.  His thesis is that conservatives can be politically successful in environmental law reforms only if their critiques of the status quo and prescriptions for improvement are ruthlessly “data ...

Nevada rancher E. Wayne Hage has been fighting the federal government for decades over his historical rights to water livestock, irrigate his ranch, and use water for domestic purposes. In the early 1990s, Hage filed a takings lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims, arguing that the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management … ...

This June, PLF is hosting two free events featuring New York Times best-selling author C.J. Box. Box’s new thriller, Breaking Point, was inspired by the plight of Pacific Legal Foundation’s clients, Mike and Chantell Sackett of Priest Lake, Idaho, who fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for their right to challenge the … ...

Last month, the Ninth Circuit declared invalid a settlement between environmental groups and federal agencies that would have altered regulatory requirements without going through the formal, and public, rule-making process. This is one of the few cases where a court has intervened to prevent the widely-reported “sue and settle” phenome ...