Alec L. v. McCarthy

Plaintiffs filed a petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court. They asked the Court to review the D.C. Circuit’s opinion affirming the dismissal of their action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. Petitioners said their certiorari petition raised the questions of whether the public trust doctrine applies to the federal government and whether federal courts have

In an unpublished opinion, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s 2012 and 2013 orders that dismissed plaintiffs’ lawsuit for lack of subject matter jurisdiction because it failed to raise a federal question. Plaintiffs argued that the federal defendants violated their obligation to protect the atmosphere under the public trust doctrine. The D.C. Circuit, like the district court, ruled that the public trust doctrine is a matter of state law.

Plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal to the D.C. Circuit for review of the district court decisisons dismissing their action and denying their motion for reconsideration.

On May 22, 2013, the district court denied reconsideration. The court rejected plaintiffs’ arguments that they had not been given an adequate opportunity to address the 2012 Supreme Court decision. The district court further found that plaintiffs’ arguments in the motion for reconsideration merely “repackage[d]” arguments that the court had already rejected, or attempted to make new arguments that could and should have been raised previously.

Defendants and intervenors argued in a motion to dismiss that plaintiffs failed to state a federal claim for relief. The district court agreed and dismissed the suit. The court rejected plaintiffs’ federal public trust doctrine claim. Relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in PPL Montana, LLC v. Montana, 565 U.S. __, 132 S. Ct. 1213 (2012), the court held that the public trust doctrine is a matter of state, not federal, law. It further held that even if the public trust doctrine were a federal common law claim, such a claim has been displaced in this case by the Clean Air Act (as was similarly held in the 2011 Supreme Court case American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, 131 S. Ct. 2527).