Justia U.S. D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

The Association filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. 552, seeking to compel the DOJ to release the Federal Criminal Discovery Blue Book. The Blue Book is a manual created by the Department to guide federal prosecutors in the practice of discovery in criminal prosecutions. It contains information and advice for prosecutors about conducting discovery in their cases, including guidance about the government’s various obligations to provide discovery to defendants. The court agreed with the district court and the Department that the Blue Book fell within the attorney work-product privilege, and thus Exemption 5, because it was prepared by (and for) attorneys in anticipation of litigation. Therefore, the court affirmed the judgment. View "National Ass'n of Criminal Defense Lawyers v. US DOJ" on Justia Law

The Corps issued Mingo Logan a permit to excavate the tops of several West Virginia mountains, then the EPA withdrew approval from two of the disposal sites, and Mingo Logan challenged the EPA's statutory authority to withdraw the two sites from the Corps permit after it had been issued but the court determined that the Clean Water Act (CWA), 33 U.S.C 1251, authorized the EPA to do so. The court remanded for the district court to consider Mingo Logan's remaining challenges under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. 706. This appeal concerns the district court's resolution of the APA claims. The court concluded that the EPA did not violate the APA in withdrawing specification of certain disposal areas from the permit; rather, it considered the relevant factors and adequately explained its decision. The EPA’s ex post withdrawal is a product of its broad veto authority under the CWA, not a procedural defect. Accordingly, the court affirmed the judgment. View "Mingo Logan Coal v. EPA" on Justia Law

Defendant pled guilty to a drug possession charge and completed his term of imprisonment in 2008. Before the expiration of his four year term of supervised release, defendant pled guilty to new charges in 2012 and was sentenced to 150 months in prison. The district court that presided over his previous drug conviction revoked defendant's supervised-release term and sentenced him to the statutory maximum of 36 months in prison, to run consecutive to the 150 months imposed for the new charges. Defendant appealed. The court held that 18 U.S.C. 3624(e), which provides that “[a] term of supervised release does not run during any period in which [a] person is imprisoned in connection with a conviction for a Federal, State, or local crime,” does not toll a supervised-release term during a period of pretrial detention if the defendant is later convicted of the charges on which he is held and receives credit toward his sentence for the time served in pretrial detention. Therefore, because the district court lacked jurisdiction to revoke defendant's term of supervised release and to impose a further period of incarceration, the court vacated the district court's order revoking the supervised-release term and sentencing defendant to 36 months’ imprisonment. View "United States v. Marsh" on Justia Law

The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), 29 U.S.C. 501(b), sets out fiduciary duties that officers and other agents of unions owe the union that employs them. At issue is whether section 501 provides a union with a federal cause of action against its agent for breach of a fiduciary duty owed to the union. Weaver v. United Mine Workers of America holds, at least, that where union members have properly sued under section 501, the union itself may take control of the suit and displace the union members. Because the Union’s section 501 claim is properly before the district court, supplemental jurisdiction exists for the Union’s state law claims. Accordingly, the court reversed the district court's order dismissing the Union's claims under section 501 and state law for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. View "International Union v. Faye" on Justia Law

Friends of Animals, a non-profit organization, filed suit alleging that the Secretary violated section 4 of the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. 1531 et seq., by not timely issuing 12-month findings in response to its listing petitions. The court affirmed the dismissal of the complaint, holding that Friends of Animals has not suffered an informational injury because this deadline provision does not itself mandate the disclosure of any information and therefore Friends of Animals does not have informational standing. Essentially, Friends of Animals has invoked informational standing prematurely. At this stage in the administrative process, Friends of Animals is not entitled to any information. View "Friends of Animals v. Jewell" on Justia Law

Plaintiff filed suit pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. 702, 705, challenging the authority of the Department of the Interior to take title to a particular tract of land under the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), 25 U.S.C. 465. The land (the Bradley Property) had been put into trust for the use of the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians in Michigan, otherwise known as the Gun Lake Band or the Gun Lake Tribe. After the Supreme Court determined that plaintiff had prudential standing to bring this suit, Congress passed the Gun Lake Trust Land Reaffirmation Act (the Gun Lake Act), Pub. L. No. 113-179, 128 Stat. 1913, a stand-alone statute reaffirming the Department’s decision to take the land in question into trust for the Gun Lake Tribe, and removing jurisdiction from the federal courts over any actions relating to that property. The court affirmed the district court's determination that the Gun Lake Act is constitutionally sound and thus plaintiff's suit must be dismissed. The court also concluded that the district court did not abuse its discretion by denying plaintiff's motion to strike a supplement to the administrative record. View "Patchak v. Jewell" on Justia Law

In 2014, Dominion obtained authorization from the Commission to convert the Cove Point liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) facility from an import maritime terminal to a mixed-use, import and export terminal. BP Energy receives pipeline and terminal services as an import customer of Cove Point under a contract with Dominion, the facility's owner. BP Energy petitions for review of the Commission’s determination that Dominion did not act in an unduly discriminatory manner under section 3(e)(4) of the Natural Gas Act (NGA), 15 U.S.C. 717b(e)(4), when it agreed to shorten the contract term of a non-open access customer’s terminal services contract, Statoil Natural Gas, without offering a corresponding “turn back” option to open access customers such as BP Energy. The court remanded to the Commission for further explanation of why the 2012 turn back agreement between Dominion and Statoil was not unduly discriminatory as to BP Energy under NGA section 3(e)(4). Although the court need not reach BP Energy’s contention that the agreement was an impermissible “sweetheart deal,” the Commission may also wish to consider and explain on remand the extent to which such a deal is relevant to the undue discrimination analysis. View "BP Energy Co. v. FERC" on Justia Law

Petitioners seek review of the Commissions' conditional authorization of the conversion of the Cove Point liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) facility from an import maritime terminal to a mixed-use, import and export terminal. For the reasons set forth in Sierra Club v. FERC (Freeport), the court concluded that the Commission was not required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq., to consider indirect effects of increased natural gas exports through the Cove Point facility, including climate impacts. In regard to petitioners’ remaining challenges to the Commission’s NEPA analysis of the impacts of ballast water on water quality, maritime traffic on the North Atlantic right whale, and the Cove Point facility’s operations on public safety, the court concluded that petitioners fail to show that the Commission did not adequately address these concerns. Accordingly, the court denied the petition for review. View "EarthReports, Inc. v. FERC" on Justia Law

Plaintiff filed suit claiming that the OCC’s enforcement action against him was trumped-up and retaliatory. On appeal, plaintiff challenged the district court's dismissal of the case on the pleadings. At issue is whether the Constitution places any limit on the governmental policy-making discretion immunized by the discretionary-function exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), 28 U.S.C. 2671 et seq. The court concluded, in line with the majority of its sister circuits to have considered the question, that the discretionary-function exception does not categorically bar FTCA tort claims where the challenged exercise of discretion allegedly exceeded the government’s constitutional authority to act. The court also concluded that plaintiff's Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics claims are not time-barred because the continuing-violations doctrine applies to extend the applicable statute of limitations where, as here, a plaintiff alleges continuing conduct causing cumulative harm. Accordingly, the court reversed and remanded for further proceedings. View "Loumiet v. United States" on Justia Law

Plaintiff appealed the district court’s grant of summary judgment dismissing her discrimination complaint on the ground of judicial estoppel. The district court found that plaintiff failed to disclose this suit and related administrative proceedings on the schedules she filed with the bankruptcy court. In exercising its decision to invoke judicial estoppel, the district court relied on the court's opinion in Moses v. Howard University Hospital. In Moses, the court wrote: “every circuit that has addressed the issue has found that judicial estoppel is justified to bar a debtor from pursuing a cause of action in district court where that debtor deliberately fails to disclose the pending suit in a bankruptcy case.” Moses held that a debtor could not avoid judicial estoppel if he omitted his pending cause of action but reported “pending lawsuits that, unlike the instant case, reduced the overall value of his assets through wage garnishment.” The district court held that plaintiff was in the same position as the plaintiff in Moses. The court concluded that the district court properly invoked judicial estoppel to grant summary judgment in favor of defendants, and the court affirmed the judgment. The court noted that other courts of appeals have evaluated the frequent contentions of bankruptcy debtors in light of the Supreme Court’s observation – in a case that did not involve inadvertence or mistake – that “it may be appropriate to resist judicial estoppel when a party’s earlier position was based on inadvertence or mistake.” The court saw no need to take sides in this debate. View "Marshall v. Honeywell Tech. Sys." on Justia Law