Sierra Club v. Lee M. Thomas, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency, American Mining Congress, National Coal Association, Intervenors

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• suggesting that the failure of an agency to issue a land resource management plan would constitute a final agency action
• explaining that an agency’s failure to act when required by law to do so, either by an implicit refusal to act or simply by an unreasonable bureaucratic delay, is reviewable under the APA
• denying writ where “[n]o statutory deadline limits the duration of rule-makings_ [and there is no] generalized congressional mandate for EPA to expedite”
• discussing the competing interests at the EPA and finding that “[g]iven that Congress provides EPA with finite resources to satisfy these various responsibilities, the agency cannot avoid setting priorities among them”
• absent a precise statutory timetable or other factors counseling expeditious action, an agency's control over the timetable of a proceeding is entitled to considerable deference
• Section 7607(b)(1) establishes circuit court jurisdiction to review “agency inaction ... when administrative inaction has precisely the same impact on the rights of the parties” as action.

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).