Top 3 Supreme Court Environmental and Administrative Trends of 2025

Below, we summarize key decisions and highlight three themes across the Court’s decisions under statutes including the Clean Water Act (CWA), City and County of San Francisco v. EPA, Clean Air Act (CAA), EPA v. Calumet Shreveport Refining, LLC and Oklahoma v. EPA, and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County.

Decisions Are Driven by Statutory Text Where It Exists

For the most part, this term’s decisions were as expected coming into this year. Some examples of those decisions are below.

• City and County of San Francisco v. EPA: Involving whether the CWA permits can include “end-result” requirements, i.e., permit terms that spell out goals instead of required methods for achieving them. The CWA generally requires parties to secure permits when their actions are expected to result in the discharge of “pollutants” to water over which the federal government has jurisdiction. States, rather than the federal government, issue many of the relevant permits. As a result, there is wide variety in the kinds of conditions that permit-issuing jurisdictions impose. A 5-4 majority of the Court, in reviewing CWA permits issued to San Francisco, California, government officials, and relying on dictionary definitions of various CWA defined terms, held that CWA permits cannot hold such “end-result” requirements. (For more, see here.)

• EPA v. Calumet Shreveport Refining, LLC and Oklahoma v. EPA: Hinged on the wording of CAA Section 607(b)(1), which sets out where CAA challenges should be filed. Emphasizing the importance of the statutory text, the Court held that challenges to final agency actions of national scope or effect can be brought only in the DC Circuit. Other challenges to final agency actions must begin in regional appellate courts. (For more, see here.)

• Seven County Infrastructure: Also hinged on the text of NEPA. NEPA lacks the detailed substantive and procedural frameworks found in the CAA and CWA. NEPA required the US Surface Transportation Board to prepare a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) analyzing a project’s direct environmental effects. The EIS at issue in this case did not fully analyze all attenuated potential environmental impacts from the project, particularly from increased upstream oil drilling around the project or downstream oil refining. After the Board approved the project, local governments and non-governmental entities sued, contending that NEPA required broader analysis. The Supreme Court disagreed, determining that NEPA is “purely procedural” and does not impose any substantive constraints. Therefore, the Court held that the Board had done sufficient analysis because it acted consistently with its own procedures and is owed substantial deference because of its scientific and regulatory expertise on questions like the amount of detail required in the EIS, the relevant facts, and the environmental impacts and feasible alternatives the Board identified. (For more, see here.)

• Port of Tacoma v. Puget Soundkeeper Alliance: Finally, in an order released at the end of the term, the Court declined to review the Ninth Circuit’s decision , which permitted plaintiffs in federal citizen suits to sue for violations of state-defined, state-specific permit conditions using a federal citizen suit mechanism. The Ninth Circuit’s decision — like those above — revolved around the relevant CWA provisions generally precluding federal court review of state-issued permits, thus preventing both plaintiffs and defendants from challenging certain permit conditions as overly permissive or restrictive in a citizen suit.

Building out this point, the Court used the same statute-first focus in other administrative law actions.

• Trump v. CASA, Inc.: Arising from challenges to Executive Order No. 14160, which sought to limit birthright citizenship, addressed whether courts could issue “universal injunctions.” Trump v. CASA hinges on a close reading of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which endows courts with the authority to hear suits in equity. District courts in Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts had each entered universal injunctions barring enforcement of the order nationwide, prompting the government to seek partial stays from the Supreme Court. The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, informed its analysis by tracing the origins of equity in English law and found no historical precedent for universal injunctions. The Court distinguished between the “bill of peace” — a form of group litigation in equity that evolved into the modern class action — and the universal injunction, concluding that “universal injunctions” lack a historic predicate. The Court reaffirmed that the equitable powers of federal courts are limited to those remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at the nation’s founding, as codified in the Judiciary Act of 1789.

• McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates Inc. v. McKesson Corp.: Involving the review of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) order interpreting the Telephone Consumer Protection Act during an unrelated enforcement proceeding, found that judicial review was permitted because the relevant statutory frameworks did not contain language like that found in CAA and CWA precluding judicial review in enforcement proceedings.

The Court continues to address disputes about how text should be read. As an example, in Stanley v. City of Sanford, an employment case arising under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the justices, each applying nominally textualist approaches, reached different results as to how the case should be decided through the Court’s opinion, two concurrences, and a dissent. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson notes that the Court should “interpret statutes consistent with all relevant indicia of what Congress wanted, as best we can ascertain its intent,” and that “pure textualism’s refusal to try to understand the text of a statute in the larger context of what Congress sought to achieve turns the interpretive task into a potent weapon for advancing judicial policy preferences.”

The Court Generally Decides “Who Decides” Questions Itself

McLaughlin Chiropractic builds on the Court’s focus last term. In last year’s seminal decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the Court held that courts must “exercise their independent judgment” when interpreting federal statutes and may not defer to agency interpretations when they determine that a statute is ambiguous. (For more on Loper Bright, see here.) In McLaughlin Chiropractic, the Court rejected the FCC’s preferred approach, which would have granted a degree of deference by binding district courts in civil enforcement proceedings to an agency’s interpretation of a statute. The Court found that the statute did not support this approach and instead favored an approach that would give the judicial branch the authority to review the validity of agency decisions in context.

Seven County Infrastructure provides a backstop to the courts-first principle. The Court allows agencies to interpret their own regulations when the underlying statutory text demands it. This case harkens back to the Court’s 2019 decision in Kisor v. Wilkie, cited approvingly in Loper Bright, which held that courts should defer to agency interpretations when they are made in a formal context, consistent with prior practice, rest on actual agency expertise, and are issued with fair notice.

Standing Doctrine Continues to Evolve

Standing, or more informally, the decision as to who has the legal right to bring a claim, continues to evolve. The Court has reviewed a number of “who can sue” cases in recent years, with Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA added this term. Diamond Alternative Energy centers on whether fuel producers can challenge California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), which aims to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. The LCFS has been challenged by a group of out-of-state fuel producers that claim the regulation unfairly burdens their operations and discriminates against interstate commerce. Importantly, automobile manufacturers that were more directly affected by LCFS than the fuel producers were, did not challenge LCFS. (For more, see here.)

The Supreme Court’s ruling is limited to the issue of standing and does not address the legality of the LCFS. By vacating the lower court’s dismissal, the Supreme Court held that the fuel producers had sufficiently alleged a concrete and particularized injury traceable to the enforcement of the LCFS. This injury, the Court found, was enough to allow the case to proceed in federal court.

The decision both underscores the importance of standing as a threshold issue in environmental and constitutional litigation. Recent standing decisions in addition to Diamond Alternative Energy include the following.

• The 2021 decision in TransUnion v. Ramirez, which held that to pursue claims in court, a party must incur actual harm to its own interests. TransUnion arose where two groups of parties sought to pursue claims under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, only one group of whom could point to concrete damages (or actual harm). The Court reversed the lower court’s damages verdict to claimants whose injuries were only legal.

• Last term’s Biden v. Nebraska decision permitted Missouri to pursue claims for damages incurred by the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, a nonprofit, government corporation separate from the state. (For more, see here.)

• Finally, Environment Texas Citizen Lobby v. ExxonMobil, a 2024 Fifth Circuit decision which the Court declined to review. (For more, see here.) The plaintiffs in Environment Texas were found to have standing to pursue claims related to only a fraction of the 16,836 violation days claimed in the case. The question was whether penalties could be awarded for the days where plaintiffs failed to establish standing. For doctrinal reasons having to do with lengthy delays in the proceedings, the Fifth Circuit found itself unable to overturn the district court decision, and the Supreme Court declined to do so as well.

Justice Jackson, in her dissent in Diamond Alternative Energy, emphasized that standing analysis is ripe for gamesmanship. There, Justice Jackson emphasized that allowing petrochemical companies to sue while not allowing plaintiffs to sue in cases like TransUnion “comes at a reputational cost for the Court, which is already viewed as being overly sympathetic to corporate interest.” Justice Jackson concluded that the Court should have refrained from deciding this case given the likelihood that the president or US Congress would moot the issue by withdrawing the pre-emption waiver central to the dispute.

Members of the firm’s Environmental team regularly help clients understand the implications of new regulations and have broad experience in challenging regulations in federal and state courts.