Utah Sues to Challenge Federal Control of Unappropriated Public Lands

The state of Utah filed a federal lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday seeking to challenge the federal Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) control over millions of acres of unappropriated public lands. In its suit, the GOP-led state asked the Supreme Court to decide whether the U.S. government can indefinitely hold public lands that have not been reserved for any designated purpose. These unappropriated lands, totaling about 18.5 million acres, have not been designated as national parks, national monuments, wilderness areas, national forests, tribal lands, or for military use, the complaint states. The suit argued that the federal government’s continued possession of unappropriated public lands deprives Utah of basic and fundamental sovereign powers over more than a third of its territory....