Norton v. S.U.W.A. (2004) abstract

This isn't that long, but an abstract for a Supreme Court case has a brutal return on hours researching vs. pages typed.

Norton, Secretary of the Interior, et al. v. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance et al. (2004)
Alex Kurt and Matt Lindstrom

Under 43 U.S.C. &1782, land designated as wilderness by Congress is protected by Congress. This land, deemed “Wilderness Study Areas” (WSAs) under &1782, is managed by the Secretary of the Interior; more specifically, an Interior Department agency called the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is charged with managing such land in accordance with a “land use plan” (&1782(a)) under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA) (Norton).

In 2004, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and others (SUWA) sought relief in Federal District Court for BLM’s failure to protect WSAs in Utah from damage caused by off-road vehicles (ORVs) under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which “compel[s] agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed” (Norton). The District Court dismissed the claims, but the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal but held that the BLM’s alleged failure to protect the land was not remediable under the APA (Norton).

The Supreme Court heard arguments the same year. In addition to claiming noncompliance with the APA, SUWA contended that the BLM broke with the Secretary of the Interior’s duty to protect WSAs under &1782 by not fulfilling the terms of its land use plan, and that the BLM did not fulfill its requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 to consider adding language regarding ORVs to its “environmental impact statement” (Norton).

The Court ruled unanimously in favor of Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, holding that SUWA could not seek injunctive relief (Blum). In delivering the opinion of the Court, Justice Scalia echoed the ruling of the Appeals Court and stated that, though the APA in fact authorizes federal courts to compel agencies to action, that stipulation was not applicable to the current case because Congress had not directed the BLM to take “discrete” action under $1782, instead leaving the agency with broad discretion regarding the prevention of land impairment (Blum, Norton). This also applied, the Appeals Court opined, to the BLM’s alleged failure to follow its own land use plan; furthermore, it was ruled that the supplementation of an environmental impact statement was only required in the case of “major Federal action” (Norton), which was not the case here (Norton).

Conservationists have largely decried the potential precedent set by Norton (Cart), saying it leaves federal land managers free to insulate themselves from judicial review over matters of land management (Blum). Conflict has followed directly in Utah – the state’s legislators in Washington wrote a bill to make up to 40 square miles of the 87% of the federally-owned land in Washington County, Utah, available for private development in 2006 (Cart). In addition, the Utah state legislature came under fire in 2007 for helping fund suits that fought federal jurisdiction of Utah wilderness – spending, critics said, that largely occurred without oversight and that could encourage development of much of Utah’s wilderness (Cart).
Sources:

Blum, Michael C. and Bosse, Sherry. “Norton v. SUWA and the Unraveling of Federal
Public Land Planning.” Lewis and Clarke School of Law.
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Cart, Julie. “The Nation: Eyes in the Wets are on Federal Land Sale.” Los Angeles
Times. June 6, 2006.

Cart, Julie. “Utah fighting the laws of the land.” Los Angeles Times. April 22, 2007.

“Norton, Secretary of the Interior, et al. v. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance et al.:
Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.”
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