Cynthia Faur, Michael Mostow Write Article for Journal of Federal Agency Action About Environmental Impact of Recent Supreme Court Decisions
Cynthia Faur and Michael Mostow, Chicago-based partners in the Quarles & Brady Environmental & Natural Resources Practice Group, authored an article for The Journal of Federal Agency Action about the potential impact on environmental matters of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the Loper Bright and Corner Post cases.
Loper Bright ended the long-standing Chevron deference to the ability of administrative agencies to determine how federal law is applied and Corner Post eliminated that statute of limitations for claim brought under the Administrative Procedure Act.
In their article, Faur and Mostow examine how these rulings may affect legal issues in the environmental realm. An excerpt:
While it may not have received the same level of press coverage as the Loper Bright decision, the Court’s decision in Corner Post may have a more destabilizing impact to the regulatory environment. In Corner Post, the Court held that the six-year statute of limitations to bring lawsuits challenging agency regulations issued pursuant to the APA does not begin until the challenger is harmed—even if the rule at issue was promulgated more than six years before the suit was brought and regulated entities have already incurred significant costs to comply with the rule’s terms.
The six-year statute of limitations that was the subject of the Corner Post decision does not apply to regulatory challenges brought under several environmental statutes because these statutes include their own limitation periods for judicial review of regulations.