In a brief filed last Thursday, the Department of Justice argued that that Utah’s lawsuit is “without merit” and should be heard by lower courts before being escalated.
The federal Department of Justice has responded to a Utah lawsuit seeking to take over millions of acres of public land.
According to The Las Vegas Sun, Utah is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to order the Bureau of Land Management to relinquish claims to more than 18.5 million acres of public land across the state. If successful, the lawsuit would reverse decades of precedent holding that such lands constitute a shared resource for all Americans.
Utah’s argument, says the Sun, “rests on a narrow and radical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.” Attorneys for the state claim that the Bureau of Land Management has no legal authority to permanently retain public land for any purpose other than constructing military bases, government buildings, and other federally-funded projects.
Over the course of the past several months, the state has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars drumming up local support for its lawsuit—and, more importantly, for its aspirations of reclaiming the land now held by the federal government.
“We want the Supreme Court to hear this argument,” Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz (R-Hooper) said in a statement. “And so they recommended that we do a little bit of public outreach to talk about that.”
“So they did feel like that was important to make sure that, one, we could be successful with educating, I think, some of the clerks at the Supreme Court and to maybe help our chance that they’ll take this lawsuit up,” Schultz said.
However, the federal government has refused to cede ground.
In a brief filed last Thursday, the Department of Justice argued that that Utah’s lawsuit is “without merit” and should be heard by lower courts before being escalated.
Among other arguments, the Justice Department said that Utah’s belief that the federal government’s actions burden the state by preventing it from managing its own lands is misplaced and, legally, unactionable.
“In fact,” the agency’s brief says, “attorneys general of other western States have recognized that challenges to the United States’ ownership of public lands in the western States are without foundation. For example, in 2016, the Conference of Western Attorneys General—which includes the attorneys general of Idaho, Alaska, and Wyoming, the three states that now support Utah’s suit—concluded that this Court’s precedents ‘provide little support for the proposition that the principles of equal footing or equal sovereignty.’”
“Utah,” the Justice Department wrote, “has not established standing here. Utah raises no claim that it owns the “18.5 million acres” of land at issue. Utah instead argues that the United States owns that land, but argues that the Constitution requires Congress to convey that land to it or to third parties whom Utah can then tax and regulate.”
The Department of Justice also indicated that, under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, the United States cannot be sued without its consent—and that Utah’s claims do not meet the standard for a waiver or exception.
“Finally,” the agency wrote, “Utah’s suit is untimely. Under the default statute of limitations for civil actions against the United States, a plaintiff must sue ‘within six years after the right of first action accrues.’ […] Utah has brought this suit 176 years after the United States acquired the lands at issue, 128 years after Utah joined the Union, and 48 years after Congress adopted the statutory provisions that Utah challenges.”
Sources
Utah files ambitious lawsuit to take control of 18.5 million acres of federal public land
Utah has no case for clawing back public land, but court unpredictable
Utah lawsuit seeking BLM lands ‘plainly lacks merit,’ DOJ says
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