Articles

Author: Damien M. Schiff Grist.com has this fairly well-balanced piece by Doug Kendall lauding retiring Justice John Paul Stevens' judicial decisions dealing with environmental law issues over his three-decade-plus tenure on the Supreme Court.  The article's thesis is that Justice Stevens universally practiced "deference to ...

Author:  Reed Hopper In a recent "Dear Colleague" letter, Representative Oberstar claims his new bill, "America’s Commitment to Clean Water Act" (H.R.5088), would "restore, but not expand, the geographic scope of the Clean Water Act" that existed prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in SWANCC a ...

Author: Reed Hopper In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the federal government did not have authority to regulate "isolated" water bodies, like ponds, puddles and mudflats that have no connection to navigable waters.  To find otherwise, the court noted, would violate the intent of Congress, the clear language of the Clean Water ...

The State of Alaska has asked the United States Supreme Court to review a decision of the Ninth Circuit which says that the federal government, instead of the state, has the power to regulate hunting and fishing in navigable waters in Alaska.  PLF has filed an amicus brief in support of Alaska, encouraging the high … ...

City sells townhouse, demolishes it, and then sends new owner bill for the demolition Representing David and Lourdes Garrett, PLF filed  this opening brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to challenge New Orleans’ unconstitutional destruction of a townhouse on their property. The facts are outrageous: They bought property from the city ...

Last year, following President Trump’s executive order directing EPA to rewrite its disastrous 2015 regulation which magically redefined millions of acres of dry land across the nation as federally protected navigable waterways, PLF offered EPA some advice, not only on how to rewrite the rule to make it conform to the limits of the Clean  ...

Appeal filed to rescue vaping lawsuit from being sucked into the Swamp When PLF first developed its litigation strategy to challenge unconstitutionally promulgated rules, a core component of that strategy was filing three simultaneous lawsuits in three district courts challenging the FDA’s vaping regulation. But the federal government would p ...

Opening day for SCOTUS nears as PLF readies to throw first pitch This week Pacific Legal Foundation filed its Reply Brief in Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, a case that arises from the Fifth Circuit and involves our client Edward Poitevent’s property in the deep woods of Louisiana. The Supreme Court of the … ...

PLF client Joe Robertson lives deep in the Montana woods at the edge of a national forest, an area increasingly prone to destructive, life-threatening fires. The only available water supply to fight fires near his property is the couple of garden hoses of flow in a foot-wide, foot-deep nameless channel that flows through a clearing … ...