Articles

Last year we reported that the Siskiyou County Farm Bureau successfully sued the California Department of Fish and Wildlife over whether the Department has the authority to limit the use of water rights.  The Department subsequently appealed the decision, and today PLF filed this amicus brief, along with the California Cattlemen’s Associati ...

An Automatic External Defribrillator (AED) is a portable device that checks the heart rhythm. If needed, it can send an electric shock to the heart to try to restore a normal rhythm. AEDs are used to treat sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) and Florida law, like many states, mandates that public schools have them on site to treat individuals suffering ...

Last year the California Coastal Commission suffered a major legislative defeat when AB 976—which would have given the Commission broad authority to levy administrative penalties without having first to go to court to prove a violation—failed to pass.  We’ve also reported on this blog that the bill is redivivus, in somewhat less ...

Today, in Duran v. U.S. National Bank, the California Supreme Court issued a ringing endorsement of the due process right to mount a defense in a class action lawsuit.  The case involved a wage and hour class action under California’s Unfair Competition Law on behalf of 260 “business banking officers” (BBOs) who claimed U.S. Bank ...

Hokum: (1) a device used (as by showmen) to evoke a desired audience response; (2) untrue words or ideas; (3) pretentious nonsense. We demonstrated in an earlier post how disingenuous the EPA Administrator was in claiming the EPA’s expansive new rule defining “waters of the United States” would “increase clarity, save us tim ...

Earlier this month, the Sacramento Superior Court held a hearing in Environmental Law Foundation v. State Water Resources Control Board, in which the environmentalist plaintiffs are seeking an expansion of the public trust doctrine to groundwater extraction that negatively affects navigable waters.  We filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Califo ...

Recently, EPA attempted to update its decades-old standard for regulating sulfur and nitrogen oxides — components of acid rain — under the Clean Air Act. The agency and the environmental groups pushing for an update agreed that the old standard was inadequate because it considered only a fraction of these pollutants’ impacts. Yet, ...

It was only a matter of time. On the heels of the Cap-and Trade Regulation, on May 22, 2014, the California Air Resources Board adopted a regulatory plan that is so severe and so inimical to the interests of the state that it almost defies description.  Officially refered to as the First Update of the AB 32 Scoping Plan, the new … ...

Two cases in the news this week made me wonder if I read the Fifth Amendment differently than the rest of the country. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” There are any number of interesting questions raised by that language, but I want … ...