Utah v. Haaland

Three lawsuits were filed in three different federal district courts challenging BLM’s “Conservation and Landscape Health” rule. The State of Alaska filed a <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/alaska-v-haaland/">lawsuit</a> in the District of Alaska; the States of Utah and Wyoming filed a lawsuit in the District of Utah; and trade associations filed a <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/american-farm-bureau-federation-v-us-department-of-the-interior/">lawsuit</a> in the District of Wyoming. North Dakota, Idaho, and Montana also filed a <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/case/north-dakota-v-us-department-of-interior/">lawsuit</a> in the District of North Dakota; the defendants filed a motion requesting that this lawsuit be transferred to the District of Utah. Utah and Wyoming challenged BLM’s reliance on a categorical exclusion for NEPA compliance. The categorical exclusion applies to “[p]olicies, directives, regulations, and guidelines: that are of an administrative, financial, legal, technical, or procedural nature; or whose environmental effects are too broad, speculative, or conjectural to lend themselves to meaningful analysis and will later be subject to the NEPA process, either collectively or case-by-case.”