The courts in New York issued 43 opinions in 2022 under the
State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA). Of these, the
largest number—27—upheld agency decisions not to
prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS), and eight
overturned such decisions. Six cases upheld actions that had been
the subject of an EIS; none overturned such actions. Two cases
can't be classified in this fashion.
These numbers are in line with the longstanding pattern that a
project's greatest litigation vulnerability under SEQRA is the
failure to prepare an EIS; if an EIS has been prepared, very rarely
will the approvals be annulled on SEQRA grounds.
The most important SEQRA developments in the past year, by far,
were the statutory amendments that required much more detailed
baseline and cumulative impact analyses, and banned the
construction of some new facilities that would add to the pollution
burden in disadvantaged communities. We discussed these amendments
in detail in our
