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The article discusses the ruling on the case Nuclear Energy Institute Inc. v. Environmental Protection Agency, where the government's decision to site a federal nuclear waste repository was upheld by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. A challenge was initiated by petitioners to the federal regime governing the Yucca Mountain repository. They argued that the compliance period adopted by the agency was based on an impermissible construction of the underlying statute. They also asserted a constitutional challenge to the approval of Yucca Mountain's selection as a federal repository. The first claim was accepted by the Court of Appeals but rejected the second.

In Lockheed Martin Corp. v. Superior Court, the California Supreme Court rejected certification for a proposed medical monitoring class, but declined to set a per se bar against class treatment of such claims. The court held that individual issues predominated because the class members had not provided substantial evidence that they could resolve dosage issues with common proof. In rejecting certification, the court improperly focused on the substantive merits of the case and raised a manageability concern for future classes of medical monitoring claimants. Although the decision expressly allows for class treatment of medical monitoring claims under certain circumstances, it limits class-wide adjudication of environmental pollution and chemical exposure claims because it requires excessive scrutiny of the merits for certification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]