Your Guide to Emerging Issues in Environmental Regulation and Litigation.
Join Goldberg Segalla’s George Buermann on November 9 at the 2018 CLM Southeast Conference in Atlanta, GA. George will be part of a panel discussion titled, “Weathering the Storm: Effective Mitigation Tools for Environmental Crisis Management.” The panel will discuss the actions insurers and businesses can take to shift their posture from being reactive to …
Last week, we reported that the judge who presided over the first trial related to alleged personal injuries from exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate-containing herbicides slashed $211 million off of the $250 million awarded to the plaintiff in punitive damages. The reduction effectively brought the jury’s prior total award of $289 million down to $78.5 million …
In a rare showing of bipartisanship before the mid-term elections, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, a Democrat, and Robert Berlin, a Republican State’s Attorney for DuPage County, filed a lawsuit seeking to place limits on emissions of ethylene oxide from a plant owned by Sterigenics U.S., LLC. The lawsuit alleges that the plant has released …
Two recently released documents – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, Global Warming of 1.5°Summary for Policymakers (IPCC Summary), issued last week, and the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule for Model Year 2021-2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks Draft Environmental Impact Statement (NHTSA EIS), issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in July 2018 – provide a stark contrast in how to respond to the …
We previously reported on the first glyphosate exposure case to go to a jury trial where a California jury awarded a former school groundskeeper $289 million. Of the $289 million award, $250 million were for punitive damages against Monsanto. On Monday, the judge who presided over the trial slashed $211 million off of the punitive …
Earlier in 2017, we reported the Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to reinstate a landowner’s challenge to the Delaware River Basin Commission’s (DRBC) moratorium on hydraulic fracturing in the 24 county region, spanning across parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and New Jersey. In that decision (Wayne Land & Mineral Group LLC v. Del. River Basin Comm’n), the court held that the definition of the …
For every barrel of oil drilled in Texas, four-to-five barrels of wastewater are produced. The abundance of untreated water has led the EPA to consider whether to permit oil drillers in Texas to discharge wastewater directly into local rivers and streams, avoiding the complicated and costly process of trucking the water to underground wells that …
On October 15, 2018, Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S.D.C. for the District of Oregon denied the federal government’s motion for judgment on the pleadings and motion for summary judgment in the Juliana lawsuit filed by 21 minors. As previously explained in this blog, the minors allege that the government has violated their constitutional rights …
Last week, a San Francisco judge issued a tentative ruling on the defendant Monsanto Company’s Motion for Judgment Notwithstanding the Verdict, and their Motion for a New Trial. This ruling threatens to gut the $289 million dollar verdict ($39M compensatory and $250M punitives) that the plaintiff Dewayne Johnson secured this summer over the company that manufactures …
It’s been written about exhaustively in PFAS circles: the C8 Science Panel and its “probable link” findings between PFOA and various diseases. This was a groundbreaking study that was part of a settlement agreement in watershed litigation that ultimately led to a whopping $671 million payout for over 3,000 individual plaintiffs. The defendant, DuPont, had …