Key Contacts
Environmental Citizen Suit Enforcement and Recent Efforts to Curb Their Use
Citizen suits have been a long-standing mechanism for individual plaintiffs and environmental groups to pursue enforcement of environmental statutes in the absence of agency action. Despite the long history of these suits and the robust body of case law related to them, some have questioned whether the citizen suit mechanisms in the prevailing environmental statutes are being used appropriately. In our own practice, we have seen a significant uptick in the use of citizen suits to advance novel legal theories, often without clear connection to the environmental protection aims that citizen suits were designed to advance. The Trump administration recently has expressed a displeasure with the widespread use of citizen suits and has taken steps to constrain the use of such suits in a manner that is still playing out in the courts.
