Radical environmentalists want to put sheep ranchers out of business in Colorado. The outcome of this case could determine the future of the sheep industry throughout the Southern Rockies.
Emerson and Fay Ray were a young couple, recently married, when they first came to California. It was the height of the Great Depression and Emerson had heard he might be able to get a job in California pouring concrete. Now the government is threatening to destroy the legacy they built for their family.
President Clinton and President Obama created two illegal national monuments in rural Utah, causing serious economic harm to the hard-working westerners who live in the area. President Trump reversed the land grab but was sued for his efforts to restore the rule of law.
In 1988, the FWS listed as endangered the Bee Creek Cave Harvestman, a cave-dwelling spider found only in subterranean limestone caves in Travis and Williamson Counties, Texas. When the federal government bars use of private property to protect species that are found only in a local area and not throughout the country, it violates the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
A small, family-owned Colorado oil and gas exploration company holds oil and gas leases in the White River National Forest in Colorado. Despite more than twenty years of investment in this area, extremists are trying to drive this small company out of business, no matter what the law says
The city of Boulder imposed a sweeping ban of the most popular and widely-owned firearms and magazines in America. Residents of Boulder now face heavy fines and jail time for the mere possession of firearms that are legal throughout the United States. In a blatant act of discrimination against a political minority, the city council also unconstitutionally raised the minimum age for firearm possession in Boulder city limits to twenty-one.
The Obama administration dropped a skill-based system for selecting and hiring air traffic controllers, and replaced it with a new system designed to favor applicants on the basis of their race. The FAA purged its system of thousands of previously-qualified, ready-to-hire applicants simply because they did not fit the right biographical profile. The government endangered public safety and owes restitution for this grave injustice.
Our client Mary A. Thoman, a Wyoming rancher whose family has raised sheep in western Wyoming for nearly seven decades, had to give up her family grazing land after her livestock losses to the grizzly bear became too great. One of her ranch hands was nearly killed in an attack. A judge put the bear back on the endangered species list—contrary to the recommendation of 20 years of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research and the pleas of ranchers and citizens of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. This makes it impossible for local and state officials to manage the growing grizzly population, and virtually guarantees more loss and death.
Federal bureaucrats, including the Secretary of the Interior, have no authority to cancel a lawfully issued oil and gas lease unless Congress has provided them that authority. Our client, Sidney Longwell, first purchased a federal oil and gas lease in Montana’s Lewis and Clark National Forest in 1982. Despite passing decade-long environmental and archeological reviews, the Clinton administration suspended his lease in 1993, and continued to suspend the lease ultimately for over two decades.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, without obtaining a permit, and over the objections of a hydrological expert, diverted a stream that flowed through the land owned by a small church, headed by Pastor Victor Fuentes. The resulting flooding destroyed the property, and the bureaucrats who did this think no one will hold them accountable.