The Nisga'a Lisims government (a First Nation located in British Columbia, Canada) approved a law allowing individual Nisga'a citizens to obtain title to previously communally owned land in a form that makes that property freely alienable. Read article
A federal court in California refused to allow the Native Village of Kivalina to sue 24 energy and utility companies for causing global warming and causing environmental changes that may well require the entire village to relocate. The court held, in Native Village of Kivalina v. Exxon Mobil Corp., 2009 WL 3326113 (N.D. Cal. 2009), that the question was nonjusticiable because it was impossible to prove causation.
A nonprofit organization named Mano en Mano that sought to build multi-family housing affordable by farm workers was stymied by a change in the town's zoning law placing a moratorium on all multi-family housing. That change in the law may have been motivated by racially discriminatory motives (by at least some townspeople) against the mostly Latino farm worker population and the nonprofit organization has sued the town of Milbridge, Maine claiming that the change in the law violates the Fair Housing A...
The federal courts cannot agree on the question of whether the Fair Housing Act (FHA) applies only to discrimination in acquiring or renting property or also applies to post-acquisition discrimination in provision of services. The Fifth Circuit held, in Cox v. Dallas, 430 F.3d 734 (5th Circ. 2005), that African American residents of a neighborhood afflicted with an illegal dump had no remedy against the city that failed to clean it up. The court held that the dump merely made the housing...