''Summers v. Earth Island Institute'', 555 U.S. 488 (2009), was a United States Supreme Court case decided 5–4 in which several environmental organizations, including

Earth Island Institute The Earth Island Institute is a non-profit environmental group founded in 1982 by David Brower. Located in Berkeley, California, it supports activism around environmental issues through fiscal sponsorship that provides the administrative and org ...

, brought suit against the United States Forest Service (USFS) to enjoin that federal agency from implementing rules that would allow the

salvage sale In the United States, salvage sales are timber sales from national forests primarily to remove dead, infested, damaged, or down trees and associated trees for stand improvement. They are controversial partly because there are no standards for the ...

of timber from 238 acres of fire-damaged federally owned land without conducting the notice, comment, and appeal process of the Forest Service Decision-making and Appeals Reform Act. While the environmental organizations were litigating the injunction in the lower courts, the parties reached a settlement regarding the 238 acres in question and the district court accordingly dismissed. The plaintiffs, however, maintained that they still had standing to challenge the constitutionality of the exemption process generally because the process was statistically certain to implicate their rights in the future. The Court decided that this argument failed because, after voluntarily settling the portion of their lawsuit relevant to Burnt Ridge, respondents and their members are no longer under threat of injury from that project. The Court decided against the plaintiffs, holding that the "deprivation of a procedural right without some concrete interest that is affected by the deprivation . . . is insufficient to create Article III standing."''Summers'', 555 U.S. at 496.

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* United States Supreme Court cases United States Supreme Court cases of the Roberts Court 2009 in the environment 2009 in United States case law United States environmental case law {{SCOTUS-stub