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After the Fodé family missed an internal agency deadline for a routine water rights transfer...
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New England fishermen fight to protect their livelihoods against an illegal fishing ban; a Washington family farm hangs in the balance after a decade-long water rights dispute; and a family-owned lumber company argues that OSHA’s in-house adjudication process is unconstitutional.
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A secret deadline might cost this family their farm
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Ron Fodé never planned to be a farmer. But in 1984, after his father suffered a brain aneurysm, Ron left school and returned home to help run the family’s farm. Over the four decades since, he and his wife raised four children there and built an idyllic life.
Now the Fodés might lose everything. A routine water rights transfer has devolved into a decade-long legal battle with the Washington Department of Ecology—all because the family missed an internal “office deadline” the agency never published, opened to public comment, or adopted as a formal rule.
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New England fishermen urge court to uphold rollback of illegal fishing ban
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Over the past ten years, four successive administrations have taken turns enacting, revoking, and reimplementing an illegal fishing ban across a 5,000-square-mile swath of the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, PLF clients Frank Green and Bob Conrad are urging the court to uphold the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the ban—and to reject an environmental group’s bid to have it restored.
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Proposed bill restores protections for farmers and ranchers
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Shortly after the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, Congress carved out an exemption to protect routine land management practices like plowing fields and maintaining drainage ditches. Over the years, however, this protection has been undermined by narrow interpretations from courts and federal agencies—leading to devastating fines and nightmarish legal disputes aimed at America’s farmers, ranchers, and ordinary property owners alike.
Fortunately, new legislation introduced by Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis aims to restore the protections Congress intended and ensure that routine land management doesn’t become a federal regulatory trap.
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Family-run lumber company challenges OSHA’s power to skip the courtroom and be its own judge
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Willmore Lumber Company is a small family-owned business in Eastern Idaho run by Jim Willmore and his three sons. In 2024, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) compliance officer issued the company three citations totaling $2,765 in penalties.
The alleged offenses? The compliance officer claimed he saw Willmore employees driving forklifts without wearing seatbelts. He also flagged an ostensibly illegible “dataplate” on one forklift and scrutinized the company’s preference for hands-on instruction over formalized, written training.
When Jim contested the citations, rather than arguing before a neutral judge and a jury of his peers, his case was sent to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) for a hearing before an OSHRC-appointed administrative law judge. Now, the Willmores are fighting back with PLF’s help, challenging the law the company was cited under and arguing that OSHA’s in-house adjudication process is unconstitutional.
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Americans still believe in property rights. Squatters proves it.
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A new A&E series, Squatters—and the online chatter it has inspired—shows that Americans care deeply about property rights, even if they’re not as familiar with the constitutional underpinnings.
As PLF’s Kate Pomeroy explains, Squatters resonates because at its core is a simple question: If you own your property, shouldn’t you be able to control who occupies it?
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