Good news from the U.S. Supreme Court today! The Court announced that it will hear two cases dealing with the treatment of forest roads under the Clean Water Act in its upcoming term. The question the Court will address is whether rainwater running off forest roads must be regulated as point source pollution, making forest … ...
PLF attorneys recently filed an amicus brief supporting Oregon state officials and several timber companies in the U.S. Supreme Court case Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center. This is the case in which the Court is being asked by the environmental group Northwest Environmental Defense Center to overturn a decades-old rule that exempt ...
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center earlier this week. Recall that the issue in Decker is whether logging road owners and users must obtain federal National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits to cover stormwater runoff on the roads. PLF filed an amicus brief on behal ...
First comes briefing, then comes oral argument, then comes . . . more briefing? That’s what the Supreme Court decided in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center yesterday, when it invited the parties and the Solicitor General to file supplemental briefs. When the Court heard oral argument last month, most of the Court’s quest ...
The parties in Decker filed their supplemental briefs with the Supreme Court today. To recap: The issue in Decker is whether logging road owners must obtain National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits to cover stormwater runoff from the roads, either because channeled runoff constitutes a point source discharge, or because it ...
The U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion this morning in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center. In a 7-1 decision, written by Justice Kennedy, the Court concluded that EPA’s Industrial Stormwater Rule exempts discharges of channeled stormwater runoff from logging roads from the NPDES permitting scheme. The Court’s opinio ...