Between holiday travels and holiday activities, we found it best to be on a bit of a hiatus here at DPP. We hope all our readers had a happy holiday season, and are finding the New Year to be all they would like it to be.

And we are ready to get back to blogging.

The Supreme Court is back in session and busy, busy, busy. We’ll keep an eye on that and inform you of what happens as the information becomes available. In the meantime, Logan has an update on the Mt. Holly case below, which settled in November. Oral arguments on Brandt, the case involving easements that could impact Rails-to-Trails and other such programs, are scheduled for this month. For review purposes, if you haven’t seen it already, here’s our posts on Brandt (here and here).

The Court is also scheduled to hear oral arguments in February in a case involving EPA rules on gas emissions. I’ll be posting a discussion of that shortly, along with some links to other discussions of the case. This case represents a foray by the Court into debates about climate change and to what extent the federal government can limit “greenhouse gases”. Since climate change and natural disasters have been linked in multiple ways by scientists, we think this case deserves some scrutiny.

That’ll get us started for the New Year — looking forward to a lot of writing in 2014!