Illinois South Project, Inc. v. Hodel

Congress passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA) to regulate strip mining. The SMCRA delegated regulatory authority to the Department of the Interior, although courts repeatedly stopped the regulations that the department attempted to implement. The SMCRA also gave states the right to propose their own regulatory systems, which Illinois (defendant) did. After several years and iterations of Illinois’s proposed regulatory system, the federal government approved Illinois’s plan. Several organizations (the organizations) (plaintiffs) sued Illinois, claiming that Illinois’s state SMCRA plan was defective in more than 50 ways. Eventually, Illinois prevailed in the district court. The organizations appealed, narrowing their challenge. One of the challenges on appeal related to the SMCRA’s requirement of a complete application. In particular, before the federal government was obligated to act on mining-permit applications, businesses had to submit a complete application. Under the federal regulations, a complete application meant that the regulatory authority had determined that the application contained sufficient information for review purposes. By contrast, Illinois’s plan required the applicant to make an apparent good-faith effort to address the required information. The organizations claimed that this difference meant that Illinois’s plan was invalid because businesses needed to engage only in a good-faith effort. But evidence indicated that the federal government read the good-faith standard to mean that (1) businesses had to submit all the information required under the federal standard and (2) the information had to be submitted in good faith (i.e., the data had to have some reasonable basis). Thus, according to the federal government, the good-faith standard was additive to the federal standard. Illinois claimed that this reading of its regulation was the correct one.