One man’s thirty five-year battle with the federal government appeared to end last September, when a federal judge ruled that the Department of the Interior had wrongly cancelled his oil and gas lease. But the battle was not over.
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.
Since 1872, federal law guaranteed citizens a “right to mine” on most federal lands. In direct conflict with that law, Oregon banned suction dredge mining, which is the only economically feasible method of extracting gold from rivers in the national forests.