Articles

Author:  Damien M. Schiff Last week, Judge Alan Johnson of the District of Wyoming ruled that the Service acted illegally when it refused to delist the Wyoming gray wolf subpopulation from the Endangered Species Act.  The court held that the Service's rationale—the state's wolf management program was inadequate to protect ...

Author: Daniel Himebaugh The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today announced a proposed rule to remove gray wolves in Wyoming from the endangered species list.  According to the Service's Federal Register notice, "The best scientific and commercial data available indicate that wolves in Wyoming are recovered and no longer meet the def ...

Recent press coverage of PLF’s challenge to the compliance order that Andy Johnson received from the EPA has highlighted some of the Orwellian language in the Clean Water Act. As you’ll recall, EPA is threatening Andy with tens of millions of dollars in fines for constructing an environmentally-beneficial stock pond on his private prope ...

Several weeks ago, the New York Times ran a front page article about the Andy Johnson’s stock pond and the EPA compliance order threatening him with more than $16 million in fines. Here’s a taste: The sun was sinking and the brook trout were biting, so Andy Johnson and his daughter Aspen, 6, stepped onto … ...

The Johnson family’s long ordeal with EPA, concerning their construction of an environmentally-friendly stock pond on their private property, is finally over. After ordering Andy Johnson to remove the pond, on pain of tens of millions of dollars in potential fines, the federal government has agreed to settle the case. Importantly, under the s ...

Over on the Federalist Society’s FEDSOC BLOG, I have a post discussing a recent decision from a federal court that federal bureaucrats overstepped their authority when they adopted fracking regulations. In 2005, Congress exempted fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (the primary federal statute intended to protect drinki ...

Today, the president is signing an executive order designed to bring more accountability to federal agencies. This executive order comes partly as a result of PLF research and cases battling bureaucratic overreach. PLF client Andy Johnson will be at the signing ceremony. Below is an article from 2016 that Andy wrote describing, in his own … ...