Dennis J. Wall

I left this Comment earlier today opposing repeal of the Roadless Rule.  The Comment period has been shortened to Friday, September 19, 2025.

As I said, I left this Comment in opposition to repeal of the Roadless Rule.

Do you think differently?

You can leave your own Comment at regulations.gov.  The Docket ID Number and the RIN are given to you below.  You now have all the information you need to leave your own Comment.

Thank you.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Re:     Docket ID No. FS-2025-0001-0001.

          You also identify this Notice as:

RIN 0596-AD66.

"Special Areas; Roadless Area Conservation; National Forest System Lands."

This Comment concerns your captioned Department of Agriculture/Forest Service Notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement.

I have had the experience of hiking through forest until I reached roads under construction.  There the forest ended.  The forest never comes back, and sometimes the roads are built.  Sometimes the construction stops where it began, but the forest is gone regardless of whether the road is finished.

          Do you think differently?

          The experience of road construction finalizing forest annihilation, as I have had, should be part of your proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule.  It is not and so I add it in this Comment.  Whether you are aware of such experiences, or whether you yourselves have had such experiences, your proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule is not informed by these experiences.  It should be.

          Do you think differently?

In my home State of Florida, a significant part of the Apalachicola National Forest will be affected by repeal of the Roadless Rule.  Long Bay is in the Apalachicola National Forest.  The Forest Service designated this as a Roadless Area.  This too should be factored into your proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule.  It has not been factored in, and so I raise it too in this Comment.

          Whether you yourselves have walked the Apalachicola National Forest is not the point.  (If you have, you have clearly not allowed the experience to affect you.)  It is natural and free there, indicative of the "old Florida" before development came and "put up a parking lot" as the Joni Mitchell song says.

          That is worth conserving.  That is why it has been conserved.  Until now.

          Do you think differently?

For all these reasons, whether taken separately or together, your Notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement to repeal the 2001 Roadless Rule should be withdrawn or, if not withdrawn, it should be rejected by any reviewing Court and by the people.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide this Comment.

 Please read the disclaimer. ©2025 Dennis J. Wall. All rights reserved. Interested in many things including Claims and Issues? There's more on my Substack newsletter.  

Welcome to readers migrating here from Insurance Claims and Bad Faith Law Blog!  I hope you enjoy the content here, and that you may be fortunate enough to gain something during your visit here so that you can take it away with you and put it to good use now or in the future.

My best to you.

In Wright v. Utd. Serv's Auto. Ass'n, No. 1:23-cv-11155-ADB. 2025 WL 2617842 (D. Mass. Sept. 10, 2025), a District Judge turned a potential humiliation into an opportunity to send a message to an appellate court.

The District Judge, sitting in the District of Massachusetts, had already certified a question of great public importance for an immediate appeal to the federal appellate court that governed, which is the First Circuit Court of Appeals.  The question concerned whether "the" Filed Rate Doctrine required dismissal of the plaintiffs' claims which required a determination whether the defendants had overcharged the insurance rates involved in the case.

     The First Circuit sent a letter, I guess you would call it, to the District Court, a procedure which I personally have never seen before.  In basic terms, they asked the District Judge to respond with its own Memorandum to clarify what was such an important public issue that they had to address it.  Rather than view this as a potential humiliation of simply putting a lower court in its place which is a common phenomenon whenever the U.S. supreme court is involved these days, for example, the District Court in this case took this as an opportunity to get the First Circuit to answer some controlling questions of law.

     These questions control the ways in which federal courts approach the subject of Filed Rate Doctrines in insurance cases.  While it becomes obvious that the First Circuit's answers to these questions, if they answer them, have implications for insurance litigation throughout the United States, the very questions themselves have implications across the nation.

     Here are the questions, with supporting citations supplied by the District Judge removed for your ease of reference:

1.       When a federal court, sitting in diversity, needs to determine whether the filed-rate doctrine applies to bar a claim, should it look to state law or federal common law to determine whether the filed-rate doctrine applies to Massachusetts state agencies?  [Citations omitted.]

2.   If federal common law is the appropriate source of law, does the federal filed-rate doctrine apply to bar claims that implicate rates set by Massachusetts state agencies, or does it apply solely to those set by federal agencies? [Citations omitted.] 

 3.  If federal common law would apply the filed-rate doctrine to rates set by Massachusetts state agencies, is the doctrine quasi-preemptive, such that it applies to broadly bar legal or equitable challenges that implicate filed rates, as Defendants contend, or does it apply only to direct challenges to the rates themselves, as Plaintiffs contend?

Wright, 2025 WL 2617842, at *2.  Determinative questions.  How will the First Circuit respond?  How will other courts, federal and state Courts alike, respond?

          This is a case to follow.

Filed Rate Doctrines are explored in three Sections of my Book on Insurer Bad Faith, 2 DENNIS J. WALL, LITIGATION AND PREVENTION OF INSURER BAD FAITH §§ 11:26, 11:26.50, and 11:26.75 (3d Edition Thomson Reuters West Publishing Co. with 2025 Supplements).

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2025 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.  Interested in many things including Claims and Bad Faith Law?  There's more on my Substack newsletter. 

Two ideas caught my attention in this Labor Day Week 2025. One is the legal doctrine known as the anti-commandeering doctrine. The other involves the enforcement of State laws and County and Municipal Ordinances.

The anti-commandeering doctrine has been defined in a major article in the Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review: "The anti-commandeering doctrine stands for the proposition that the federal government may not force state governments to carry out its will."

The anti-commandeering doctrine is generally spoken of with regard to acts of Congress, but it applies to everyone wielding the powers of the federal government. That is because the doctrine depends on the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which reserves all powers to the States which are not expressly given to the federal government.

I will explore this doctrine in more detail in the future, but my initial thought is that it provides a legal basis for at least some of the resistance to the regime's actions. It does not, I think at first glance, provide opposition itself.

That leads conveniently and directly to the second idea that has caught my attention recently: the idea that when actions are taken in the name of the federal government in such a way that the actions allegedly violate State criminal laws or County and Municipal ordinances, the perpetrators might be subject to local law and federal law cannot protect their crimes.

This could apply to assaults, kidnapping, "unlawful restraint," obstructing justice (such as by kidnapping people at courthouses who are there for legal proceedings in the courts), and in general "acting beyond their legal authority" in which case "they can be prosecuted, assuming they commit crimes, in state court." The quotes are attributed to Larry Krasner, District Attorney of the City of Philadelphia, in a Substack article.

Whether Krasner said these things or not, is not the point. Certainly not the point for me.

Rather, the idea expressed in these quotes is the point. It sounds theoretically plausible to me: If a person, anyone, commits a crime under State law or in violation of an ordinance, they are theoretically liable to be prosecuted for those crimes. That's an interesting idea, so far as it goes.

The City of Chicago has apparently adopted an ordinance against 'law enforcement officers' wearing masks and requiring them to show ID, among other things. I have seen some commentary that Chicago has not gone far enough to make violations of the ordinance legal offenses, but for the sake of argument at the moment suppose that these ordinances are enforceable law in Chicago.

I have seen the Police at work in Philadelphia and I have seen them in Chicago. Without having any personal experience with the Police in either city, I can tell you that in my judgment, the Philadelphia Police and the Chicago Police are both fully capable of enforcing the law in their cities.

That being said, the question becomes: Will they? Will they enforce the law and arrest 'federal officers' who commit State crimes in their cities? Or who violate County or Municipal Ordinances? If not, who will enforce the law?

A version of this article was published on Substack.  (You can see there photos of the sign, front and back, that I carried on Labor Day 2025.)