The US Department of Justice (DOJ) Environment and Natural Resources Division has announced a major overhaul in the use of Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) - a key penalty mitigation approach commonly used in...more
On September 24, 2018, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the Clean Water Act (CWA) does not require a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for the discharges of pollutants to...more
The natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) process has evolved since its inception in the late 1970s. The innovations keep coming. In 2016, a third-party “credit banking” mechanism was used for the first time to settle...more
On October 4, the Ninth Circuit reversed the District Court for the Southern District of California's decision to allocate to a government contractor 100 percent of cleanup costs for hazardous contamination at a manufacturing...more
The Tenth Circuit on July 19, 2017, in Chevron Mining, Inc. v. United States, reversed a decision by the District Court for the District of New Mexico and held that the United States is liable as an “owner” under the...more