On Wednesday, the California Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District, (the Court) denied a petition brought by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) regarding University of California, Davis’ (UCD) failure to produced documents in response to a public records request. The case, HSUS v. Regents, addresses an issue that is extremely important in the current public debate about lead ammunition. The case is important because it addresses the ability of researchers at publicly funded universities to withhold information related to their own research, even when the results of that research are at the heart of a hotly contested issue.
For years, NRA has been fighting in the courts on behalf of conservationists, hunters and recreational shooters to stop the efforts of self-proclaimed environmental groups using lawsuits to limit access to public lands. These groups try to stretch the limits of environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), to use these laws in unintended ways in order to limit the managed public use of wilderness areas and parks for hunting, shooting, and other recreation.
On May 15, 2012, Pacific Environmental Advocacy Center (PEAC), Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the Sierra Club, and the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council served the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) with a second 90-day Notice of Intent to Sue under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), as well as a second 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue for alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Previous petitions had led to a lawsuit, in which the NRA participated, that was thrown out of court.
Washington : - As part of NRA’s continuing efforts to protect hunters and recreational shooters from special interest groups seeking to restrict or eliminate hunting by banning the use of traditional ammunition consisting of lead components, the NRA will ask the United States District Court in Washington, D.C. to allow it to join in a newly filed lawsuit; The Trumpeter Swan Society, et al. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, et al.
On April 9, 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rejected the Center for Biological Diversity’s (CBD) second Petition asking EPA to ban the use of lead ammunition nationwide. The EPA’s response stated that EPA would not review CBD’s new Petition because it is “almost identical” to CBD’s prior Petition that sought to ban lead ammunition and fishing tackle nationwide.
On December 1, 2010, attorneys for the California Rifle and Pistol Association Foundation (the Foundation) made a public record request to the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). That request sought the production of documents regarding, among other things, the results of certain ammunition sampling related to a published thesis and the related paper Ammunition is the Principal Source of Lead Accumulated by California Condors Re-introduced to the Wild. That 2006 paper is often cited as providing the justification for limiting hunters’ use of traditional lead-based ammunition.
The National Rifle Association (“NRA”) and the California Rifle and Pistol Association Foundation (“CRPAF”) were recently thwarted in their efforts to obtain the original data used by researchers in two U.C. Santa Cruz studies. These studies are heavily relied upon by self-proclaimed environmentalists to justify banning the use of traditional lead ammunition for hunting by claiming that there is a causal link between hunters’ use of lead ammunition and health problems found in California condors.
In a welcome ruling from a lawsuit in which the National Rifle Association (“NRA”) and Safari Club International (“SCI”) participated, on December 28, 2011, the District of Columbia federal court confirmed that governmental agencies are not required to enact hunting regulations based on speculative arguments and specious science allegedly connecting hunting to endangered species mortality.
In a major legal victory, a federal judge today ruled in favor of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and threw a lawsuit filed by the environmental group, Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) out of US District Court in Phoenix, Arizona. Safari Club Interational had joined the case as a "friend of the court." and assisted NRA with its successful efforts.
On September 6, 2011, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council served the U.S. Forrest Service (USFS) with a 90-day Notice of Intent to Sue under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), as well as a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue for alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The groups make its claim despite the fact that the official record plainly shows that when California condors were reintroduced to Arizona it was as an experimental flock (10j), and the experimental reintroduction was allowed only after express agreements were made by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies that the "reintroduction" would not impact hunting in any way.
