Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 10 of 10

Full-Text Articles in Law

Highway Culverts, Salmon Runs, And The Stevens Treaties: A Century Of Litigating Pacific Northwest Tribal Fishing Rights, Ryan Hickey Oct 2018

Highway Culverts, Salmon Runs, And The Stevens Treaties: A Century Of Litigating Pacific Northwest Tribal Fishing Rights, Ryan Hickey

Public Land & Resources Law Review

Isaac Stevens, then Superintendent of Indian Affairs and Governor of Washington Territory, negotiated a series of treaties with Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest during 1854 and 1855. A century and a half later in 2001, the United States joined 21 Indian tribes in filing a Request for Determination in the United States District Court for the District of Washington. Plaintiffs alleged the State of Washington had violated those 150-year-old treaties, which remained in effect, by building and maintaining culverts under roads that prevented salmon passage. This litigation eventually reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held in favor …


Collaboration Through Nepa: Achieving A Social License To Operate On Federal Public Lands, Temple Stoellinger, L. Steven Smutko, Jessica M. Western Oct 2018

Collaboration Through Nepa: Achieving A Social License To Operate On Federal Public Lands, Temple Stoellinger, L. Steven Smutko, Jessica M. Western

Public Land & Resources Law Review

As demand and consumption of natural gas increases, so will drilling operations to extract the natural gas on federal public lands. Fueled by the shale gas revolution, natural gas drilling operations are now frequently taking place, not only in the highly documented urban settings, but also on federal public lands with high conservation value. The phenomenon of increased drilling in sensitive locations, both urban and remote, has sparked increased public opposition, requiring oil and gas producers to reconsider how they engage the public. Oil and gas producers have increasingly deployed the concept of a social license to operate to gain …


Public-Private Conservation Agreements And The Greater Sage-Grouse, Justin R. Pidot Oct 2018

Public-Private Conservation Agreements And The Greater Sage-Grouse, Justin R. Pidot

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In 2015, the Obama Administration announced its conservation plans for the greater sage-grouse, an iconic bird of the intermountain west.Political leadership at the time described those plans as the “largest landscape-level conservation effort in U.S. history,”and they served as the foundation for a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (“FWS”) that a listing of the bird was not warranted under the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”). The Trump Administration appears poised to substantially amend the plans, although an array of interested parties have urged that the plans be left intact. Regardless of the outcome of this debate, conservation of …


Streamlining The Production Of Clean Energy: Proposals To Reform The Hydroelectricity Licensing Process, Travis Kavulla, Laura Farkas Oct 2018

Streamlining The Production Of Clean Energy: Proposals To Reform The Hydroelectricity Licensing Process, Travis Kavulla, Laura Farkas

Public Land & Resources Law Review

Hydroelectric power is an efficient and clean source of power. In an era when air emissions dominate public concern about the environmental effects of the energy sector, it is a paradox that among the most highly regulated energy projects are hydroelectric dams, which do not combust fuel. This is partly due to a failure of successive statutory enactments,which have transformed hydroelectric licensing from a regulatory “one-stop shop” with a single regulator, to a process chained to a bewilderingnumber of often conflicting regulatory agencies, often riven with delay. Hydroelectric licensing has also failed because its capacious standard of review encourages special-interest …


Whose Lands? Which Public? The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah S. Purdy Jan 2018

Whose Lands? Which Public? The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. …


The Past As Prologue To The Present: Managing The Oregon And California Forest Lands, Michael Blumm, Tim Wigington Jan 2014

The Past As Prologue To The Present: Managing The Oregon And California Forest Lands, Michael Blumm, Tim Wigington

Faculty Articles

This article is a brief review of the convoluted history of what are known as the Oregon and California forest lands, federal lands that were once the subject of a 19th century federal railroad grant, then became the focus of widespread land fraud and official corruption, which led to the Supreme Court halting land sales and Congress taking back the lands, situated in eighteen Oregon counties. Federal management of the lands in the 20th century emphasized timber harvesting, and this dominant use of the lands led to environmental lawsuits and the Endangered Species Act listing of the northern spotted owl …


The Oregon And California Railroad Grant Lands’ Sordid Past, Contentious Present, And Uncertain Future: A Century Of Conflict, Michael Blumm Apr 2012

The Oregon And California Railroad Grant Lands’ Sordid Past, Contentious Present, And Uncertain Future: A Century Of Conflict, Michael Blumm

Michael Blumm

This article examines the long, contentious history of the Oregon & California Land Grant that produced federal forest lands now managed by the Bureau of Land Management (“O&C lands”), including an analysis of how these lands re-vested to the federal government following decades of corruption and scandal, and the resulting congressional effort that created a management structure supporting local county governments through overharvesting the lands for a half-century. The article proceeds to trace the fate of O&C lands through the “spotted owl wars” of the 1990s, the ensuing Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), the timber salvage rider of 1995, and the …


From Martz To The Twenty-First Century: A Half- Century Of Natural Resources Law Casebooks And Pedagogy, Michael C. Blumm, David H. Becker Jan 2007

From Martz To The Twenty-First Century: A Half- Century Of Natural Resources Law Casebooks And Pedagogy, Michael C. Blumm, David H. Becker

University of Colorado Law Review

Clyde Martz published the first natural resources law casebook in 1951, combining the previously discrete subjects of water law, mining law, and oil and gas law. Martz relied almost exclusively on case excerpts and emphasized the creation of private rights in natural resources. Over the nexthalf century, through several generations of casebooks, the natural resources course developed in response to the rise of the environmental movement and a series of energy crises. This article traces the evolution of the natural resources law casebooks from Martz's pioneering effort through several generations of texts to a new generation of casebooks that has …


A Property Rights Approach To Sacred Sites Cases: Asserting A Place For Indians As Nonowners, Kristen A. Carpenter Jan 2005

A Property Rights Approach To Sacred Sites Cases: Asserting A Place For Indians As Nonowners, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

Although the Free Exercise Clause prohibits governmental interference with religion, American Indians have been unsuccessful in challenging government actions that harm tribal sacred sites located on federal public lands. The First Amendment dimensions of these cases have been well studied by scholars, but this Article contends that it is also important to analyze them through a property law lens. Indeed, the Supreme Court has treated the federal government's ownership of public lands as a basis for denying Indian religious freedoms claims. This Article contends that such holdings rely on an "ownership model" of property law wherein the rights of the …


In The Absence Of Title: Responding To Federal Ownership In Sacred Sites Cases, Kristen A. Carpenter Jan 2003

In The Absence Of Title: Responding To Federal Ownership In Sacred Sites Cases, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

This paper examines the challenge of protecting American Indian sacred sites located on federal public lands. Many have addressed this issue in the religious freedoms context, but I believe the problem is just as much about property law. The Supreme Court's decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, for example, would appear to suggest that federal ownership of certain sacred sites trumps tribal free exercise clause claims regarding those sites. This holding corresponds with a classic model in which "[p]roperty is about rights over things and the people who have those rights are called owners." However, a …