Articles

Victory for the First Amendment! Challenging Florida’s Tone Deaf Hearing Aid Bureaucrats Supreme Court Splits on Salmon Santa Barbara Association of Realtors v. City of Santa Barbara Victory for the First Amendment! Political speech is the most protected type of speech in the country – including in the most restricted space in American civi ...

Federal judge grants temporary restraining order against Mount Dora over Starry Night mural  Does the California ESA extend to your neighborhood squirrel population? PLF opposes Seattle’s attempt to levy an unconstitutional “wealth tax” Supreme Court declines to review important timber sale case Opening brief challenging Seattle& ...

Earlier this week, a coalition of “corporate”** environmental groups sought leave to file a supplemental complaint in NRDC v. Jewell, to challenge the Bureau of Reclamation’s water allocations to Sacramento River water users.  The nub of this case—which has been going on for a decade—is the environmentalists’ o ...

As mentioned in our president’s Friday roundup, PLF recently submitted comments on an EPA draft publication, An Assessment of Potential Mining Impacts on Salmon Ecosystems of Bristol Bay, Alaska.  There have been voluminous public comments on this document, as some believe EPA might be contemplating making the Bristol Bay watershed, an area ...

Earlier today Aquafornia noted that state and federal authorities had reached an agreement on joint operations of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project and management of the projects with regard to species included in the National Marine Fisheries Service’s flawed 2009 biological opinion, e.g. salmon and steelhead.  The agreemen ...

Author: Brandon Middleton Earlier this week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave a fairly routine political speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  The subject of Salazar's speech was California's water, and the Secretary paid particular attention to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan and the need to use the best available sci ...

Author: Brandon Middleton Judge Wanger issued this decision today, which contains the following conclusion: For all the reasons set forth above: (A) Plaintiffs‘ and DWR‘s motions for summary judgment that the BiOp violates the ESA and the APA are GRANTED IN PART AND DENIED IN PART; and Federal Defendants‘ and Defendant-Intervenors‘ cross mo ...

Author:  Damien M. Schiff On Monday, oral argument was heard in National Wildlife Federation v. National Marine Fisheries Service, a decade-long lawsuit brought by environmentalists challenging the federal hydropower projects in the Pacific Northwest.  The case boils down to whether the feds can come up with a plan to operate the dams i ...

Author: Brandon Middleton After years of less than normal precipitation, California is perhaps on its way to a wet water year.  The recent rain throughout the state has led many to believe that the state is no longer in a drought.  But while drought conditions may have eased in terms of greater precipitation, California's regulatory ...