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Supreme Court Victory! The Supreme Court gave Pacific Legal Foundation a resounding victory on Monday in United States Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes. The unanimous Court held that a Corps of Engineers’ Jurisdictional Determination (i.e. wetlands delineation) is immediately reviewable in court and subject to challenge. For the first time s ...

WOTUS rule stayed! The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed EPA’s infamous Waters of the United States rule today.  While the court still has yet to decide whether it actually has jurisdiction over the challenges brought to the rule (as opposed to the challenges starting in various federal district courts around the nation where separate  ...

Supreme Court and wetlands determinations — again? After we won Sackett on the question whether a landowner is entitled to judicial review of a wetlands ruling before facing ruinous penalties and permitting costs we had hoped the federal government would get the message.  It hasn’t.  So now we have two new petitions before the Suprem ...

Equality under the law: Race-preferences in university admissions Pacific Legal Foundation has been leading the fight for equality under the law since its founding in the early 1970s.  Back in 1978, we argued against racial preferences in the Supreme Court in the Bakke v. Regents of the University of California. And we have been fighting for Ab ...

Bad news on property rights from the California Supreme Court To celebrate the Magna Carta’s 800th birthday, the California Supreme Court issued this unanimous and depressing opinion on the state of property rights in California.  California Building Industry Association v. San Jose involves the city’s requirement that builders of 20 o ...

California Supreme Court to rule on forced housing subsidies We’re expecting a ruling on Monday in California Building Industry Association v. City of San Jose, the challenge to San Jose’s affordable housing mandate.  While it admitted that it had not shown that the construction of new homes creates a need for more subsidized low-inco ...

Wetlands — Major victory in the 8th Circuit The 8th Circuit handed us this major victory today in Hawkes v. United States.  The decision is a wonder to read because the court “got it.”  It understood that requiring a landowner to seek a wetlands permit when the landowner doesn’t think there are any jurisdictional wetlands ...

Environment — Victory for common sense in permitting reviews The California Supreme Court issued this opinion in Berkeley Hillside Preservation v. City of Berkeley Hillside Preservation v. City of Berkeley, a case dealing with environmental reviews under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA.) That statute, much like its federal anal ...

Environmental Law – Judicial Review of Jurisdictional Determinations This week we asked the United States Supreme Court to review a decision of the Fifth Circuit holding that landowners have no right to challenge a determination by the United States Army Corps of Engineers that their land is subject to the agency’s permitting control under ...