When it rains too much in San Francisco, the city's wastewater treatment plant can get overloaded. An overloaded wastewater treatment plant means that a city-operated, EPA-permitted point source in the Pacific Ocean could...more
Another major shift in the role of executive administrative agencies and congressional delegations of power to agencies may be on the way. ...more
For those of you who still haven't heard, in a surprising 2-1 ruling, the D.C. Circuit held that the Council on Environmental Quality had no legal authority to issue its regulations governing federal implementation of NEPA....more
Last week, Venable’s Government Division offered its general thoughts on the fallout from the Supreme Court’s reversal of the long-standing Chevron deference principle. Here, the Environmental Practice Group offers some of...more
7/3/2024
/ Administrative Procedure Act ,
Chevron Deference ,
Chevron v NRDC ,
Clean Air Act ,
Climate Change ,
Constitutional Challenges ,
Government Agencies ,
Greenhouse Gas Emissions ,
Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo ,
Regulatory Authority ,
Regulatory Oversight ,
Relentless Inc v US Department of Commerce ,
SCOTUS ,
Statutory Interpretation ,
Waters of the United States
In a monumental opinion issued today, the U.S. Supreme Court in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overruled Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., holding (6-3) that deference to an agency's...more
7/1/2024
/ Administrative Procedure Act ,
Chevron Deference ,
Chevron v NRDC ,
Constitutional Challenges ,
Government Agencies ,
Judicial Authority ,
Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo ,
National Marine Fisheries Service ,
Regulatory Authority ,
Relentless Inc v US Department of Commerce ,
SCOTUS ,
Stare Decisis ,
Statutory Interpretation ,
Unconstitutional Condition
Does the National Environmental Policy Act require an agency to consider environmental impacts beyond the proximate effects of actions within the agency's jurisdiction? That's the question that the U.S. Supreme Court has...more
Based on immediate reactions to the long-awaited final "Phase II" NEPA regulations, one might think that the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) substantially altered long-standing federal environmental review practice....more
Everyone knows what "and" means. "And" is not a word you have to look up. So why did the use of "and" in a criminal sentencing statute divide the U.S. Supreme Court? Because the statute's grammatical structure allowed "and"...more
Imagine you're crafting an argument in an appellate court. The key statute has language that favors you, but a decades-old Supreme Court case goes the opposite way. Or, from the other side, the case is favorable but the...more
Every first-year law student learns two ways that a court can have jurisdiction over a corporate defendant. If the defendant has "minimum contacts" with a state, and the plaintiff's injuries arise out of those contacts, then...more
7/26/2023
/ Constitutional Challenges ,
Dormant Commerce Clause ,
Due Process ,
Foreign Corporations ,
General Jurisdiction ,
Interstate Commerce ,
Mallory v Norfolk Southern Railway Co ,
Out-of-State Companies ,
Personal Jurisdiction ,
Registration Requirement ,
SCOTUS ,
Undue Burden
Every day, untold thousands get online to buy goods, book services, or sell something. And almost without fail, they are greeted with a Terms and Conditions pop-up. Then, perhaps the most common human experience of the...more
On the surface, a dispute over whether small fishing businesses should be required to pay for onboard monitors to observe their catch would not appear to be a potential game-changer for administrative law. But when the...more
The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 most notably raised the debt ceiling. But the legislation also made substantive changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), with an eye toward simplifying and streamlining...more
Clean Water Act practitioners have spent the past 50 years learning how to identify a wetland or water body that qualifies for federal jurisdiction—and the past 17 parsing the phrase "significant nexus." The upshot was that...more
5/31/2023
/ Clean Water Act ,
Corporate Counsel ,
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ,
Federal Jurisdiction ,
Inland Waterways ,
Navigable Waters ,
Sackett ,
Sackett v EPA ,
SCOTUS ,
Significant Nexus Test ,
Waters of the United States ,
Wetlands
The Supreme Court’s opinion last week in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross raises more questions than it answers regarding what state laws might violate the dormant Commerce Clause. California prohibits the in-state...more
Just before the crystal ball dropped in Times Square on New Year's Eve, the U.S. EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made available a pre-publication copy of their final revised definition of "waters of the United States"...more
The U.S. Supreme Court's October 2022 term began with a bang: a new Justice on the bench, the public back in the courtroom for the first time since the pandemic - and two hours of argument about the scope of federal...more
The end of the Supreme Court's term usually brings divided decisions. But in Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, the whole Court agreed on both the result and the reasoning in a trim 11 pages....more
6/13/2022
/ Airlines ,
Arbitration ,
Arbitration Agreements ,
Exemptions ,
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ,
Federal Arbitration Act ,
Interstate Commerce ,
Putative Class Actions ,
SCOTUS ,
Southwest Airlines ,
Wage and Hour
When Boechler v. Commissioner was argued, I wrote about how the statute in the case presented several grammar and usage quandaries. Now, the Supreme Court has unanimously agreed: The statute's text is a mess....more
The statute sounds simple. A criminal defendant faces enhanced penalties if he has previously been convicted of three felonies committed on "occasions different from one another." But the defendant in Wooden v. United States,...more
On January 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari on a fundamental environmental law question that has lingered for several decades - what is the appropriate definition of "waters of the United States" (WOTUS) in...more
1/28/2022
/ Certiorari ,
Clean Water Act ,
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ,
Jurisdiction ,
Permits ,
Rapanos v US ,
Sackett ,
SCOTUS ,
Section 404 ,
Significant Nexus Test ,
US Army Corps of Engineers ,
Waters of the United States
Sometimes, yes. At least that’s one takeaway from the argument in a recent U.S. Supreme Court case, Boechler, P.C. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. ...more