Stanford Environmental Law Clinic Announces Ninth Circuit Upholds Case Requiring U.S. EPA to...

Posted on: Wednesday, 23 July 2008, 18:00 CDT The Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford Law School today announced that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of environmental organizations seeking to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate ship discharges under the Clean Water Act. Dealing a setback to the shipping industry, the decision follows a 2005 lower court ruling that the EPA had illegally exempted ship discharges from Clean Water Act requirements. That decision gave the agency until September 2008 to end the regulatory exemption and issue permits to ships, an order that the EPA appealed to the Ninth Circuit. "The EPA spent nearly ten years fighting against using the nation's only comprehensive law to combat an environmental plague that is costing the U.S. economy billions of... [read full story]