Here’s the Opening Brief on the Merits, filed last month in a very interesting and important case now pending in the California Supreme Court, City of Perris v. Stamper.
Update: Answering Brief posted here.
We reported on the Court of Appeal decision here. The court held that that in a condemnation action, the jury
One portion of the federal Uniform Relocation Act, 42 U.S.C. § 4651, requires Federal agencies participating in projects requiring the acquisition of private property to be guided by certain policies that “assure consistent treatment for owners . . . and . . . .promote public confidence in Federal land acquisition practices,” such as (and we’re paraphrasing
Looks like they’re at it again, a solution in search of a problem: a bill has been proposed in the Hawaii Legislature to create an “Environmental Court,” whose mission would be to handle “environmental disputes” arising under a wide range of state statutes:
…administrative proceedings and proceedings for declaratory judgment on the validity of agency
The Hawaii Supreme Court has been on a roll lately, giving us a series of decisions clarifying appellate procedure. So in the past couple of months, we’ve got cases about appealability, dismissing appeals for a brief not conforming to the rules, and what is a final appealable order. Good stuff for those
This is the second half of a post from the week before last, about the Hawaii Supreme Court’s opinion in Goo v. Arakawa, No. SCWC-30142 (Feb. 19, 2014).
In that case, the court was presented with two issues. First, what should an appellate court do with a trial court’s judgment when a case
On Tuesday, February 18, 2014, Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie named Judge Michael D. Wilson as his nomination for associate justice to the Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii to fill the upcoming vacancy when Associate Justice Simeon Acoba retires in March, having reached the mandatory retirement age. See Rebecca Copeland’s post on Record on
Update 2/19/14: the Honolulu Star-Advertiser has this report (“The appellate court decision was an ‘overwhelming victory for the city from an ideologically diverse panel, said Robert Thomas, a Honolulu-and San Francisco-based attorney who attended the hearing in August. The panel comprised Judges Stephen Reinhardt, Mary Schroeder and Andrew Hurwitz. ‘All three of them agreed. They
Update: a deeper review of the opinion here.
The Ninth Circuit has affirmed the District Court’s decision upholding for the most part the environmental review of the Honolulu rail project. Here’s the summary from the court:
The panel affirmed the district court’s dismissal of plaintiffs’ claims under the National Environmental Policy Act and Section 4(f) of
Here’s the Verified Petition and Complaint, filed last week, in which a coalition of New York landowners sued the governor, claiming that the state is dragging its heels in its environmental review of fracking. We’re interested because a bad on fracking may lead to takings problems, although this lawsuit does not raise such
There’s not much doubt that the now-notorious large-scale unpermitted upland grading and grubbing by a Kauai property owner on its private land caused the runoff that catastrophically damaged the adjacent beach and the reef offshore. The damage was pretty bad, and resulted in the “largest storm water settlement [with the federal EPA] in the United