Articles

caption id="" align="alignright" width="567" Is this navigable? An exposed permafrost layer -- considered to be a "water of the United States" by the Corps of Engineers. Permafrost underlies roughly 85% of Alaska's 663,300 square miles./caption PLF asks Supreme Court to hear Alaska permafrost case This week, PLF filed a petition asking the ...

caption id="attachment_46402" align="alignright" width="300" Show me on the picture where activity will have no impact on the river./caption This morning a California Court of Appeal issued an unfortunate opinion (although given the state of California courts, perhaps an unsurprising one) affirming in full a trial court decision that imposed pub ...

caption id="attachment_46402" align="alignright" width="300" Thankfully, no party has claimed that groundwater is "navigable"/caption This morning PLF filed this amicus brief in the California Court of Appeal for the Third District in support of the County of Siskiyou. We asked the Court of Appeal to overturn this superior court decision, which ...

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral argument in Sturgeon v. Frost, in which the issue is whether the National Park Service can regulate activity on property it does not own but is located within the exterior boundaries of a National Park. Several justices were skeptical of the federal government's argument that Congress has ...

It is ice cold under sunny skies in the nation's capitol today, as Washington DC braces for yet another storm of the century this coming weekend. It is a fitting setting for the Supreme Court to hear oral argument today in the aptly-captioned Sturgeon v. Frost. In this case, the National Park Service is claiming the power to regulate non-federal wa ...

We have written (and litigated) at length about the errors of the United States Forest Service, whether that be on forest access, ongoing water rights infringements, or the fire risk that the agency is imposing on its neighboring land owners. So, when the agency does something right, however small, we are obliged to acknowledge it. Last year, the ...

In a guest column in today's major Sacramento printed news product, Christopher Thornburg complains that California's water rights system is inherited from medieval England. He is not really correct about that. California does enjoy a complex system of related water rights doctrines, only some of which have anything to do with English common law ...

In the course of California's long drought, state regulators have taken ever more aggressive measures to gain control of local and private water supplies, under cover of emergency declarations from Governor Brown, and emergency regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board. Some of these measures are aimed at requiring additional ...

 Lawsuit abuse -- Filing without injury PLF filed this letter brief asking the California Supreme Court to review of Animal Legal Defense Fund v. LT Napa Partners—which PLF asked the Supreme Court to overturn an Unfair Competition Law (UCL) case that threatens important civil justice reforms enacted by California voters.  Several years ago t ...