Prior to joining Equal Justice Works, he was a Fellow at Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger LLP in San Francisco, where he represented citizen groups and local agencies in environmental litigation and land use and planning issues.
On a recent Thursday at 6 a.m., Daniel Gonzalez, head of Hogan and Hartson's international arbitration and litigation practice, landed at Reagan International Airport in Washington, D.C., capping off a three-day business trip to Argentina.
The litigation involved lands that the abbey held in Hampton and Bengeworth in Worcestershire, but that the diocese maintained were actually part of one of the bishopric's manors.
"This is a huge commitment," said Utah representative Kay Christofferson, a Republican who sponsored legislation approved last Thursday creating a so-called "public lands litigation account" through which the state is beginning to finance a possible lawsuit.
Complex land litigation lead to the property law that today dominates Britain and much of the West.
Jack Ward Thomas, President Bill Clinton's chief of the forest service, says litigation has tied land management agencies in a giant "Gordian knot," one which the legislation just signed by the president is likely to pull tighter.
The question that is likely to dominate much of the litigation, wherever it lands, is the extent of liability for BP and the companies it worked with.
While bighorn sheep die-offs have occurred in every western state (Toweill and Geist 1999), recent conflicts in Intermountain states over the origins of disease effects on bighorn populations have erupted within the contexts of litigation over public lands grazing, Endangered Species Act dynamics, and the restoration discourse all noted above.
And so the lawyers are teeing up their lawsuits and we can expect extensive litigation before these lands will lose their protection.
The grand jury's annual report, issued in June, concluded that supervisors should not have approved public funding for litigation involving privately owned land that the state high-speed rail project is seeking for the right of way.
He has been an expert witness in Indian land claims litigation.
