Lewis v. USA, No. 21-30163 (5th Cir. 2023)
Annotate this Case
In this consolidated appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled on a decade-long dispute between landowners Garry L. Lewis and G. Lewis-Louisiana, L.L.C. (together referred to as "Lewis") and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) over the federal jurisdiction of "wetlands" on their Louisiana property under the Clean Water Act (CWA). The case involved numerous Supreme Court cases, jurisdictional determinations, federal court cases, and appeals.
Lewis's property was primarily used as a pine timber plantation. In 2013, Lewis requested a jurisdictional determination from the USACE to develop the property, which went unanswered until a formal request two years later. The USACE concluded in 2016 that portions of the property contained wetlands subject to CWA jurisdiction. Lewis appealed, leading to a reconsideration and a substantially unchanged jurisdictional determination in 2017. Lewis then filed suit in federal court, claiming that the Corps' action was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The district court found the administrative record insufficient to support the conclusion that wetlands on the property met the "adjacency" test or had a "significant nexus" to traditional navigable waters and remanded the case back to USACE for further review.
On remand, USACE revised the data and applied a recently issued regulation. However, the revised determination nearly doubled the alleged wetlands on one of Lewis's property tracts. After another round of litigation and appeals, the case reached the Fifth Circuit, where Lewis argued that under no interpretation of the administrative facts could his property be regulated as "wetlands" subject to the CWA.
The Fifth Circuit agreed with Lewis, drawing upon the Supreme Court's recent decision in Sackett v. EPA which held that the CWA only extends to wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are "waters of the United States" in their own right. The Fifth Circuit found that there was no such connection between any plausible wetlands on Lewis's property and a "relatively permanent body of water connected to traditional interstate navigable waters," and thus, there was no factual basis for federal Clean Water Act regulation of these tracts.
The court also rejected the government's arguments that the appeal was moot due to the withdrawal of the 2020 jurisdictional determination, and that the case should be remanded to USACE for reevaluation. The court held that the agency's unilateral withdrawal of a final agency action did not render the case moot and that remand was not appropriate because there was no uncertainty about the outcome of the agency's proceedings on remand.
Consequently, the Fifth Circuit vacated the judgment of the district court and remanded with instructions to enter judgment in favor of Lewis that the tracts in question are not "waters of the United States" under the Clean Water Act as interpreted by Sackett v. EPA.
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.