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Article: State courts best for the status quo
- Article from:
- Charleston Gazette
- Article date:
- May 4, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2001 Charleston Gazette. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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MANY people celebrated when the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals
overturned a key mountaintop removal mining decision on
jurisdictional grounds. The appeals panel said the issue belonged in
state courts, not federal ones.
That had been the argument by outside lawyers hired by the
Underwood administration and retained by Gov. Bob Wise. That had
been the argument by coal industry lawyers, too.
Until the decision was handed down, I hadn't really asked myself
why the industry and its government friends would prefer for these
cases to be heard in state courts.
But I started thinking about it when I read a story about how the
state Department of Environmental Protection was trying to knock a ...