Constitutional Law

High Court Rules In favor of EPA's Clean Water Regulations; Sides with Employers in Arbitration Case

The U.S. Supreme Court today turned away environmental groups' challenges to EPA regulations of large power plants' cooling systems. The regulations were aimed at power plants that employee 'cooling water intake' structures that use water from nearby sources to help cool their facilities. The structures, as noted in today's decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, pose threats to the environment by destroying aquatic organisms in the water sources used by the power plants. The EPA regulations fashioned pursuant to the Clean Water Act permitted variances in their implementation if power plants could show either that the costs of compliance were 'significantly greater than' the costs considered by the agency in setting the standards, or that the costs of compliance 'would be significantly greater than the benefits of complying with the applicable performance standards.'

Environmental groups argued that the EPA's cost-benefit regulations ran afoul of the Clean Water Act. A federal appeals court agreed, finding unlawful the site-specific cost-benefit variance provision. Writing for the 6-3 majority in Entergy Corp. v. EPA, Scalia said the EPA's interpretation of the Clean Water Act was sound. 'When Congress wished to mandate the greatest feasible reduction in water pollution, it did so in plain language: The provision governing the discharges of toxic pollutants into the Nation's waters requires the EPA to set ‘effluent limitations [which] shall require the elimination of discharges of all pollutants if the Administrator finds … that such elimination is technologically and economically achievable.'' Citing a brief of the challengers, Riverkeeper, Inc., Scalia wrote that, 'They acknowledge that the statute's language is ‘plainly not so constricted as to require EPA to require industry petitioners to spend billions to save one more fish or plankton.''

In a win for employers, the high court ruled 5-4 that they can force unionized workers into arbitration over age discrimination claims. The court's decision in 14 Penn Plaza LLC v. Pyett overturned a federal appeals court decision that employers could not force workers into arbitration and waive their rights to take their claims to a court. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority said, 'We hold that a collective-bargaining agreement that clearly and unmistakably requires union members to arbitrate age discrimination claims is enforceable as a matter federal law.' Writing for the dissent, Justice David Souter said the majority had subverted a 1974 high court ruling in Alexander v. Gardner-Denver in support of policy 'favoring arbitration.' The Court in Gardner-Denver, Souter wrote, 'held that a clause of a collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) requiring arbitration of discrimination claims could not waive an employee's right to a judicial forum for statutory claims.'

In a 7-2 decision, the justices overturned a federal appeals court decision that barred payment to federal attorneys involved in state clemency proceeding. In Harbison v. Bell, Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, concluded that federal law does permit 'federally appointed counsel to represent their clients in state clemency proceedings and entitles them to compensation for that representation.' The case involved a convict's request that the government pay his public defender to represent him in a clemency petition proceeding in Tennessee. In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said compensation of federal attorneys should only be permitted in federal cases.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on April 01, 2009 (boomark / email).