Articles

I’ll be on the Armstrong & Getty show this morning at about 8:15 Pacific time to talk about EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s comments about environmental regulations and their impact on the economy. You can listen online here. Update: You can listen to the podcast here. … ...

This morning, I am testifying before the House Committee on Natural Resources on the lack of transparency in the government’s administration of the Endangered Species Act, a lamentable practice that if anything has intensified during the current Administration.  My written testimony goes into some detail to provide examples of this lack of t ...

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court really doesn’t like arbitration.  It doesn’t matter that Congress enacted the Federal Arbitration Act in 1925 specifically to counteract judicial hostility to arbitration.  The Massachusetts court remains hostile, and has shown considerable creativity in striking down arbitration contracts in w ...

What you and I would call a fabrication is known in the Halls of Justice as a “legal fiction.” A legal fiction is “an assumption that something is true even though it may be untrue, made especially in judicial reasoning to alter how a legal rule operates.” Black’s Law Dictionary For decades, the courts have … ...

Environment — Endangered Species Act — Sea Otters We filed our complaint in California Sea Urchin Commission v. United States Fish & Wildlife Service.  The Service has a statutory duty to contain a transplanted colony of California sea otters in Southern California.  As noted in our blog, because the Service decided last year to i ...

The City of Richmond, in the San Francisco Bay Area, is moving ahead with a controversial plan to use eminent domain to acquire mortgage loans from the lenders who currently hold them, at significant discounts from the loans’ face value.  The balance of the loans in question exceed the current market value of the homes … ...

Last week, I testified before the House Natural Resources Committee on the federal government’s maladministration of the Endangered Species Act.  Most of hearing, however, focused on United States Fish & Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe.  Just a few days before the hearing, the Inspector General’s office of the Department of Int ...

youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msQ_khFmKtU#at=232/youtube Our friends at LearnLiberty.org recently released this excellent video explaining the “bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation and why it explains environmental regulation. This phenomenon isn’t limited to federal regulation, of course. As we recently explain ...

There has been a lot of coverage of our Sea Otter suit over the last week, not all of it fair. As we explained when we announced the filing, this case is fundamentally about the rule of law and balance in environmental regulation. It’s not about opposing the otter’s recovery. In 1986, Congress passed a … ...