June 04, 2018
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday issued a criminal sentencing ruling that sidestepped a larger issue of how fragmented 4-1-4 decisions should be interpreted by lower courts — something environmental attorneys had been watching for its importance to the ongoing battle over the Clean Water Act's reach.
March 27, 2018
The U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged Tuesday that there's no great way to read its fractured rulings that lack a clear majority opinion, but suggested that one litigant's proposal to solve the problem would result in "chaos" and throw the justices out of whack.
March 26, 2018
Environmental attorneys will be paying close attention Tuesday to a U.S. Supreme Court case that has nothing to do with environmental law as the justices hear oral arguments on how fragmented 4-1-4 decisions should be interpreted by lower courts, an issue that looms large in an ongoing battle over the Clean Water Act's reach.
March 23, 2018
The U.S. Supreme Court will cover a wide variety of subjects when it returns to the bench this week to close out the penultimate oral argument session of the term, revisiting its American Pipe decision on class action deadlines and debating how lower courts should read its fractured rulings.
February 02, 2018
A case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court is forcing the justices to grapple with how lower courts should view rulings when the justices split 4-1-4 and there is no majority opinion to serve as precedent, a frequent occurrence that often results in a tangle of conflicting decisions.
January 05, 2018
Federal and state court judges made several important environmental law rulings in 2017 that managed to avoid the spotlight, from a Ninth Circuit finding that climate change data was misused in a government analysis of how increased fishing could impact loggerhead turtles to a California Supreme Court ruling on groundwater extraction fees.