Articles

As the President prepares to nominate a new Supreme Court justice, one of the major issues likely to turn on that choice is the fate of Chevron deference. According to that infamous doctrine, courts must defer to agency's interpretations of the statutes they administer unless that interpretation is patently unreasonable. In practice, courts have us ...

The wheels of justice grind slowly. And sometimes they come to a complete halt. That's what happened over the past year to fishermen challenging the illegal designation of a 5,000 square mile national monument in the Atlantic Ocean. The first anniversary of the filing of their case passed several weeks and they are still waiting on the governmen ...

The Washington Post has published my op-ed defending the President's power to revoke existing national monuments. Several months ago, President Trump ordered a review of the last 21 years of monument designations. For good reason, the evidence is indisputable that abuse of the monument power has been far worse the last few years. Whether you ...

On behalf of its client the Marquette County Road Commission, today Pacific Legal Foundation filed its Reply Brief in Marquette County Road Commission v. EPA, a case now pending before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. In this important administrative and environmental law case, PLF and Mike Patwell, a Michigan environmental law sp ...

Yesterday was the deadline for public comments on the Department of Interior's recommendation to the President about what to do about the 27 large national monuments established since the Clinton administration. Reflecting the significant impacts of monument designations, there are sure to have been 10s of thousands of comments submitted. Now the A ...

caption id="attachment_45726" align="alignleft" width="300" The scene of the plowing, showing what the government insists are "small mountain ranges."/caption Last Thursday, the chairmen of the House Agriculture and Judiciary Committees sent this letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, stating their concern that the Clean Water Act is being us ...

President Trump has announced his intent to nominate PLF Senior Attorney Damien Schiff to the Court of Federal Claims. There, he will join former PLF attorney, Judge Victor Wolski. We at PLF are very grateful for having had Damien for the past 13 years, but our loss is the Republic's gain. We fully expect Damien's confirmation to be swift and pain ...

As President Obama's final term came to a close, he engaged in what has unfortunately become a favorite pastime for lame duck Presidents: trying to build a legacy by abusing the Antiquities Act. President Obama was the Barry Bonds of this abuse, shattering his predecessors' records. All told, he declared more than 550 million acres off-limits to re ...

  embedhttps://youtu.be/h0STUFKYMuo/embed When President Trump announced that he selected Judge Neil Gorsuch as his nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States, PLF promptly released its statement recognizing that Judge Gorsuch is superbly qualified for appointment to the High Court. We can now dive deeper into his background and ...