 Well, bon appetit, everybody. I want to introduce our lunch speaker, Mark Squalache. Mark is the Rafael Moses Professor of Law at the University of Colorado. He is one of the leading scholars in the country in the law of natural resources. And I can say, in fact, I've taught out of his natural resources casebook several times. It's a wonderful book, extremely thoughtful. Mark has been engaged in a variety of ways with the Antiquities Act. And he was describing at dinner last night traveling with Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt to consult with localities about designation of national monuments during the end of the Clinton administration. Fascinating. So as well as being an outstanding scholar, an advocate having participated in litigation over the elimination of national monuments or the diminution of them. And also just engaged with the community about both what makes these spaces so special and the competing needs for economic development. So he brings to this topic a great wealth of experience and as well as theoretical knowledge. So I think we're really fortunate to have him today as our lunch speaker. Mark will speak for about 30 minutes and there will be time for questions. And I look forward to all of that. So Mark, thank you for being here. Thanks very much for joining me for this presentation. Hope I don't interrupt your lunch too badly, but it's really a pleasure to be here. I've really enjoyed the morning sessions. I was telling some folks that I actually teach some of the National Historic Preservation Act work and of course that I teach at the law school at Colorado. And it's really helpful for me to hear from folks who are practicing in the field. I'm gonna be talking today, as Peter said, about the Antiquities Act. And I should mention that much of what I'm gonna talk about has to do with broader landscapes as opposed to the historic sites that we've been talking about earlier this morning. But of course, the Antiquities Act is a law that often does protect historic sites and buildings and those kinds of things. You all probably are aware of the fact, for example, that President Obama designated the Stonewall Inn in New York City recently as a national monument and so there are plenty of examples of using the Antiquities Act to protect historic properties. I wanna start by talking a little bit about the language of the Antiquities Act because it becomes important in trying to understand where we're going with the Antiquities Act. So here's the key language from the statute. It's not very long, but you can see what it does is it gives the President the authority to proclaim or declare by public proclamation, historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures. And then the key phrase, other objects of historic or scientific interest situated upon lands under controlled by the United States. And what does he do? He declares them to be national monuments and he can reserve those lands or parts of those lands but is limited by the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected. So all of this language becomes important in some of the disputes that are ongoing right now over the Antiquities Act. Why do we have the Antiquities Act? Many of you probably know this history but I thought I'd remind you of some of this early history of the law. So right around 1900 there was a lot of concern about looting that was going on on our public lands primarily in the Western United States. I call it looting but much of it was being done by famous museums all over the world including here in the United States. They were out on the public lands and basically dismantling some of the historic artifacts that we have now protected largely through the Antiquities Act. And so there was this big debate about how to protect them. Some of the early proposals from Congress would have protected smaller tracks of land, relatively small tracks of land that were situated right around the historic sites but the Interior Department which was very interested in these proposals really wanted to give the president the authority to designate national parks. And so there was this kind of tension between what Interior wanted and what some members of Congress wanted. You can see the language from one of the early Interior bills that would have actually allowed the president to designate national parks. And what emerged was I think really a compromise between what some of the congressmen had wanted and what the president or the Interior Department had wanted which was giving the president this authority to designate objects of historic or scientific interest. I thought I'd kind of start by talking about some of the controversies over the Antiquities Act. There have been a bunch of them. I'm gonna highlight what I think are some of the biggest controversies. And it really starts with one of the early and most important of the national monuments, the Grand Canyon designated by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908. Roosevelt was an interesting character. He was president when the Antiquities Act was passed in 1906 and he wasted no time really in using the law for very broad kinds of purposes. And the Grand Canyon turned out to be quite controversial because of this character named Ralph Henry Cameron. Cameron was a Arizona politician, ultimately became a US senator from Arizona. And Cameron had an interesting sort of scam going down in the Grand Canyon. He basically located mining claims right along the Bright Angel Trail. And he used those mining claims essentially to charge a toll or a fee for anybody who wanted to hike down the Bright Angel Trail to the Grand Canyon. He charged people a dollar. This sort of got the ire of the Santa Fe Railroad Company which had built a hotel on the south room of the canyon and was bringing its guests to the hotel so that they could enjoy the splendor of the Grand Canyon. But the guests didn't like very much that when they were hiking down the Bright Angel Trail they were having to pay a fee to Cameron. And so they protested and the Santa Fe Railroad Company complained to the Interior Department about these claims. Cameron wasn't really interested in mining. He was interested in, unless you call mining tourists I guess a kind of mining. He was interested in collecting these fees. And so the Interior Department investigated and found that these mining claims were not valid and so had them declared invalid by the Interior Department. But Cameron really wouldn't leave. He was kind of, by this time he'd become a US Senator and he thought he had power to sort of prevent Interior from enforcing these decrees. And this led to a big dispute between Cameron and the railroad and the United States. And ultimately this led to a decision from the United States Supreme Court. Probably the only time that the court has directly confronted the scope of the Antiquities Act and then in this 1920 opinion from the Supreme Court the court quite explicitly upholds the notion of broad what I would call landscape scale monuments. The court said that the Grand Canyon is one of the greatest eroded canyons in the United States if not the world and therefore surely it qualifies as an object of scientific interest. And that somewhat puts to bed this notion about whether or not the Antiquities Act can be used to protect these large landscapes. An issue that is still somewhat prominent today but I think Cameron speaks pretty loudly about the appropriateness of this use of the Antiquities Act. Another controversy involved the Mount Olympus National Monument again designated by Roosevelt just in the waning days as he was about to leave office. He designates about 600,000 acres of land as the Mount Olympus National Monument. And what was controversial was the decision to almost cut it in half by Woodrow Wilson just six years later after the original designation. Now there's some debate I think about why Wilson did this. Some historians have suggested it was in aid of the war effort to provide lumber for boats that they were building for World War I. I think there was at least some labbing on the part of the mining and the timber industries to cut back the monument. What was left after Woodrow's cutting back was just basically the rock and ice portion of the monument, the higher elevation portions of the monument. I think what's sort of interesting about this historical accounting of the Mount Olympus National Monument is that almost all of this land was ultimately restored when Congress designated Olympic National Park. So the Olympic National Park is now nearly a million acres, much larger than the original monument, and includes most of the lands that Wilson had cut out of that monument. So largely left intact after the congressional decision. To me, one of the more interesting controversies involved Jackson Hole National Monument, now part of the Grand Teton National Park, was designated in 1943 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And it was very controversial in the state of Wyoming. What happened here was that John D. Rockefeller Jr. had acquired land, had basically set up a land company to acquire land, because he was concerned about protecting the land in the Snake River Valley below the high peaks of the Grand Tetons. He viewed it as a really important wildlife area, and he wanted to see it protected. And he prevailed upon the president in the Interior Department to go along with a designation of about 221,000 acres of land as the Jackson Hole National Monument. The Wyoming congressional delegation and Wyoming politicians were adamantly opposed to what FDR had done. Cliff Hansen, who later became a US senator at the time, was a county commissioner in Teton County, led a cattle drive through the new monument illegally protesting the designation of the monument. There was a great deal of controversy over it. One of my favorite stories was the story of a young Alan Simpson, of course, who later became a senator from Wyoming. Alan Simpson apparently was taken by his father than US Senator Millward Simpson to meet Harold Dickies. And according to Alan Simpson's brother, Pete Simpson, who I knew when I taught at the University of Wyoming, Alan Simpson refused to shake the hand of Harold Dickies because of the Jackson Hole National Monument. And so sort of an interesting way in which the local politicians protested. Well, again, what I find most interesting about this story is that all the politicians who later realized the great benefit that was achieved by this monument recanted their opposition. Of course, Congress, there was a big controversy. The only time that the Antiquities Act was ever amended was to basically make it illegal to designate new monuments in Wyoming. Wyoming's the only one that enjoys this exception from the statute. But Alan Simpson and Cliff Hanson before he died and others who had opposed the monument later believed that that was a big mistake. And they've now agreed that this was one of the greatest things that happened to Teton County. Of course, it was made part of the Grand Teton National Park by Congress subsequently. Excuse me. So the other sort of more recent controversies which I'll get to here more in a minute involve the two monuments that are now in litigation, Grand Staircase Escalante, designated by Bill Clinton and of course, Bears Ears, designated by Barack Obama. Just a note about the Southern Utah Monuments, much like the Jackson Hole National Monument, a lot of controversy, a lot of opposition from the local politicians in Utah to these two new monuments. What I find somewhat ironic about this opposition is that it seems counter to the message that the Utah Tourist Commission seems to lay out for the public. They have this campaign which some of you may have seen where they advertise what they call the Mighty Five. The Mighty Five in the Utah Campaign are the five national parks down in Southern Utah. Four of those national parks began as national monuments under the Antiquities Act and it's just kind of interesting to see how this has evolved. I might add, by the way, that the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, which was greatly opposed by local politicians, those folks have pretty much turned around now. If you go to the Escalante Chamber of Commerce website, you will find statements from the president of the Chamber of Commerce, extolling the virtues of the original Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. They recognize how that's been such a boon to the local economy in Southern Utah and the town of Escalante in particular. Okay, so what I wanna do really with most of my time today is to talk about some of the litigation that's going on under the Antiquities Act. There's a fair amount of it. It's all, I think, kind of interesting. I'm gonna talk about four cases that actually involve the Antiquities Act and one that actually involves the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act but it's related, I think, to the discussion that I'd like to have about the Antiquities Act. So let me start with the Cascade Siskiu National Monument. This is a monument that was designated in the state of Oregon, originally by President Clinton. He designated about 52,000 acres in Oregon and among the controversies created by this monument, which is known to be a really important ecological area, it banned commercial logging. And in 2016, Obama added about 48,000 acres to the monument and what's sort of interesting about this monument and what sets it apart from some of the others is that about 40,000 acres of this land were in what are called the Oregon and California revested lands, something I'll talk about in a minute. It's important to note, however, that the existing land use plan for this area actually prohibits or limits logging in a large portion of it. So eliminating logging or abandoning logging from these lands was not unprecedented by any means. There was a recent decision from the local court on this monument in the Murphy Company case involving the question of whether or not the president could designate lands that are part of this Oregon and California Revested Lands Act lands and the reason basically surrounds the language of this statue. These are sort of a strange set of lands. They're only in the state of Oregon. They involved this railroad company that had wanted to build this railroad, but they violated the terms of the grant. You may remember, if you remember your Western history, the checkerboard lands that came about as a result of some of the railroad land grants. Well, this was like that. There were checkerboard lands that were granted to the railroad, but then the railroad didn't come through with its obligations under the grant. And so these lands, about 2.6 million acres of land, were actually returned to the United States. And when they were returned, they were returned under this special law, the ONC Lands Act. And you can see the language of the ONC Lands Act, which is sort of important, where it suggests that this land should be managed for permanent forest production, to provide a permanent source of timber supply. But it's interesting, if you read on in the language of the statute, it's supposed to contribute to the economic stability of the communities and provide recreational facilities. So it was not exclusively for timber production, and that becomes important in the decision by the court in this particular case. So the decision came from a magistrate judge in Oregon, upholding the expansion, and the court acknowledges that there's some tension between the ONC Lands Act and the Conservationist Purpose of the Antiquities Act, but found that there really wasn't an irreconcilable conflict and that therefore, the designation should be upheld. I'll note, however, that there is a separate lawsuit that's pending in the DC courts right now, in the federal courts in DC. That decision has not come out yet. Note that this separate lawsuit was filed by the counties who were claiming potential lost revenues from the timber receipts that they would otherwise receive from the logging that would occur. And it'll be interesting to see whether the DC court agrees with the Oregon court on the outcome here. One interesting fact, at least it's interesting to me, is that the Justice Department under President Trump has defended the decision to designate and expand this monument, the original decision, and the Obama decision to expand the monument. So it's going to be interesting to see how this comes out. I should mention that this litigation began before Trump took office, and so the Justice Department has simply continued to take the position that it originally took in this particular case. I mentioned that there's this other lawsuit that does not actually involve the Antiquities Act, but instead involves the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. The reason I mentioned this decision is because it may have some relevance to the outcome of some of the decisions and some of the cases involving the Antiquities Act. What happened here was that President Obama issued a couple of memoranda and executive orders, basically withdrawing certain lands in Alaska that are on the Outer Continental Shelf from oil and gas leasing, and when Trump became president, he essentially withdrew or revoked these orders from President Obama. And the question that the court had to resolve in this case was whether or not the federal, excuse me, whether or not the president had the authority to revoke these other withdrawals. And we get this decision in League of Conservation Voters versus the American Petroleum Institute just earlier this year, basically holding that Trump lacked the authority to revoke the withdrawals. And I wanna point out that here's where the issue relating to the Antiquities Act comes in because section 12A of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act specifically authorizes the president to withdraw from disposition certain Outer Continental Shelf lands from a leasing, but doesn't say anything about the president's authority to revoke or modify withdrawals once made. And that's sort of the issue that we're now dealing with in some of the Antiquities Act cases. The court does a fairly exhaustive review of the statute and ultimately concludes that, looking at the context, the legislative history and similar statutes concludes that Congress is the only agency with the authority to essentially shrink withdrawals or revoke withdrawals that are issued under section 12A. We've got this other sort of interesting monument off the coast of the New England basically in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument. What's interesting in this particular case, a large what we call a marine monument designated under the Antiquities Act. You can see it's nearly 5,000 square miles so it's a huge massive area, but it's in the exclusive economic zone of the United States so you may recall that these lands are those lands that are from 12 miles to 200 miles off the coast of the United States. And this designation, this national monument banned oil and gas development in the Outer Continental Shelf on these lands as well as most commercial fishing it is and was a controversial. Here's the interesting legal question though. Remember that language from the Antiquities Act? It allows the president to designate lands that are owned or controlled by the United States and so the question was does the United States control or own the lands that are in the exclusive economic zone? And we get a decision from the court in the Massachusetts Lobsterman's Association case from DC, the DC district court, the court basically saying that yes, the United States has sufficient control over the lands in the exclusive economic zone for the president to designate a national monument. I think what helped in this case were a couple of things. One is that there is a office of legal counsel opinion from 2000 that goes through in some exhaustive detail explaining why the Justice Department believes that the United States does in fact control lands in the exclusive economic zone so that was helpful to the court in reaching its decision. And then also, once again, the Trump administration has defended this particular monument in court. Again, a case that was first filed during the Obama administration and the Justice Department has continued to defend it. Interesting, the case is on appeal right now so we'll see what the DC circuit has to say about this. This is one of those cases that I suppose could go to the US Supreme Court but I suspect that we won't know that for quite some time. All right, so the other two cases that I wanted to briefly talk about were the Bears Ears and Grand Stair cases. Bears Ears in many ways is the more controversial of the two just because of what the president has done here. So Obama designates about 1.35 million acres of land around the Bears Ears National Monument. This is all in southeastern Utah. I'll show you a little map here in a minute showing where it was but the really key point to be made here is that President Trump issued a proclamation about a year after the original proclamations by Obama essentially reducing the size of the Bears Ears monument by about 85%. And I think it's important to just stop for a moment and recognize that this particular decision along with the decision I'll talk about in a minute involving Grand Staircase involves the largest, really an unprecedented kind of removal of land protection in the United States. There's nothing really that comes close to this decision. You'll remember I mentioned the Woodrow Wilson decision involving Mount Olympus that took about 300,000 acres out of that monument but here we have more than a million acres removed from the National Monument designated by Obama in the Bears Ears case nearly that much also removed in the context of Grand Staircase. So these are huge decisions and so this is going to be interesting to watch in terms of how the courts decide to handle these reversals. I just think it's interesting to note that shortly after Trump issues his decision in Bears Ears we get this story out of the Washington Post pointing out that all these spectacular fossils are being found in what was the original Bears Ears monuments. These are lands that have now been removed. You'll remember that the language of the Antiquities Act involves protecting historic and prehistoric structures and historic kinds of landmarks and objects of historic and scientific interest. It seems like these old fossil beds clearly have some kind of scientific interest and it's going to be interesting to see whether and how the courts decide to deal with this. Just interesting language here we can argue about the different experts that have opined on this case but at least some experts believe that there may be 100,000 or more archaeological sites in the Bears Ears monument as originally designated by Obama. Many of these of course have never even been identified or acknowledged so it's an interesting kind of case from that perspective. Grand Staircase equally controversial at least in some ways, it's an interesting case also and I should mention that I have drafted and filed an amicus brief in this case on behalf of the plaintiffs so I've sort of given my side of the issue. This was done on behalf of environmental law professors by the way so I'm not unbiased in sort of viewing this monument but it's an interesting case to me not just because of the issue that's raised in Bears Ears but also because there was a major piece of legislation that was enacted by Congress after the Grand Staircase monument was designated in 1996 by President Clinton and what that language did was it took out what we call the state sections from the monument and allowed the state of Utah to trade those state sections in the monument for very valuable mineral lands that were outside of the monument so the state got actually a pretty good deal out of this legislation and there's an interesting question that's not been raised in the Bears Ears case of course which is whether or not Congress effectively ratified the Grand Staircase monument through this legislation we'll have to see again what the court decides to do with this but it's an interesting issue that is I think going to be important in the outcome of that particular decision. Again, the reduction in this case not quite as substantial in terms of percentage as Bears Ears but still a really significant reduction in the monument. There are about a million acres left out of the 1.87 million that were in the monument before the Trump decision and so a very controversial kind of decision. It's interesting if any of you have been to that area down in South Central Utah, the local businesses which originally opposed the monument now all have signs in their windows supporting the original monument. It's kind of interesting just to see the change in views of some of the local businesses that are benefiting substantially I think from the tourist business that has resulted from the designation of that monument. Just to sort of situate you, I don't know how well you can see this map but I thought it might be useful to try to show you what we're talking about here in terms of these two monuments. So and I'm sure you can't see the broader outlines of the original monuments. They're sort of shown here. This is a map from the Grand Canyon Trust and you can see at the bottom, you can see sort of the location in Utah where these two monuments occur. The one to the east is the Bears Ears Monument and the one in the middle is the Grand Staircase Monument. You can see they're both quite large and what you see in the larger map is just how Trump really significantly shrunk those original monuments in the case of Bears Ears. Two relatively small units were left in the monument in the case of Grand Staircase. There are three units that are left in. And one of the things that's really interesting to me about these monuments is that the Obama and Clinton monuments really tried to sort of unite some of the other conservation lands in the area. And what the Trump proclamations have done or tried to do is to sort of split up some of these areas. So the quarters that would have allowed sort of management of larger ecosystems have to some extent been compromised by the decisions on these new proclamations. Okay, so lots of lawsuits. These are all pending right now before Judge Chutkin here in the DC Federal District Court. There have been motions to dismiss that have been filed by the federal government and those are pending before Judge Chutkin. She previously denied the state of Utah's request and the government's request to change the venue to Utah. So the cases are firmly ensconced to now in the DC District Court. And the judge is now taking under consideration the motions to dismiss that have been filed by the federal government and various parties. It's all been briefed. The plaintiffs have asked for hearings, oral argument sometime in July. The judge has not yet ruled whether she's going to hear argument in July or sometime thereafter, but that's all pending. So we're just waiting really for the judge to move on these cases. These are motions to dismiss and there was at least some discussion about whether or not the motions to dismiss are going to actually resolve the merits of the case. I think they are. We ended up having to brief essentially the merits of these cases and I don't really see how the judge is going to avoid the merits in ruling on these motions to dismiss. It's going to be interesting to see what the court decides to do. Lots of plaintiffs, as I said, in this case from all different walks of life. I think the Bearser's case has really been the one that's attracted the most lawsuits. I think there are five lawsuits that were filed by various parties and two or three in the case of Grant's staircase. They've all been consolidated now and I expect we're going to get probably separate decisions for the two monuments, but probably simultaneous decisions from Judge Chutkin in these cases, hopefully sometimes before the end of the year. So I thought I'd just spend a moment talking about the legal issue that the court is really confronting in these cases. And it has to do with that language. You'll remember from the Antiquities Act that gave the president the authority to reserve the lands. Now remember I said there was a parallel between the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act which gave the president the authority to withdraw certain lands from oil and gas leasing. And so that's sort of the parallel. And I wanted to just highlight the fact that when we're talking about the president's authority, we're talking about a delegation from the Congress. You may recall that it's the Congress that has the authority to manage the property of the United States under the property clause and that it's crystal clear that the authority of Congress is without limitations. And so when the president is exercising authority under the Antiquities Act or other statutes like this, he is essentially exercising delegated authority. And the sort of the law in this area suggests I think quite clearly that these delegations are supposed to be construed narrowly. So what do we have in this particular case? Well, we have this language that says that the president can reserve the lands. It says nothing about the president's authority to modify or revoke such reservations. And so if you're a textualist, at least, one would think that you'd want to read that language as giving only one-way authority. That is that you only can reserve the lands. There's no authority to actually reverse those reservations. And I think there's some pretty powerful arguments to support that position. I'm not unbiased, as I said, but I think it's pretty interesting to look at the language of similar statutes that were passed contemporaneously with the Antiquities Act. I've highlighted two here, one that came after the Antiquities Act, the Pickett Act of 1910, which gave the president similar authority to withdraw public lands, but also gave the president the authority to revoke withdrawals that were made in this particular situation. And similarly, under the Forest Service Organic Act of 1897, this was a little bit before the Antiquities Act, you can see that Congress authorized the president to modify an executive order establishing a national forest and to reduce the area or change the boundaries or may vacate altogether any order creating such reserve. So I think it's just really interesting to point out the fact that Congress knew how to give broader authority than just the one-way authority that is apparently allowed under the Antiquities Act, did not choose to do that in the case of the Antiquities Act. And so I think that's going to be a powerful argument in the court when the judge ultimately rules in this case. And as I said, this sort of parallels the arguments that were made in the Alaska case involving the oil and gas withdrawal that took place in Alaska. And it'll be interesting to see if the district court in DC reaches a similar conclusion in these cases. There's some other interesting law here, a precedent that we might look at. One is the 1938 opinion from Attorney General Homer Cummings. Cummings was Attorney General under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And in the Cummings opinion, he basically says that there's no authority to revoke or rescind national monuments that have been issued by the president, but he implies that presidents can shrink them. There's this past history that I mentioned under the Mount Olympus National Monument, for example, and there have been a few others where presidents have shrunk or reduced the size of monuments. And so there's this debate about whether past practice might be enough to allow presidents to override what appears to be fairly clear text. The interesting point, of course, here, is that there's never been a challenge to such modification. So there may be some sort of implicit approval from the Attorney General's opinion, although it's quite, the court, or excuse me, the AG does not actually analyze this issue even though there's this sort of implication. I think we're gonna have to see what the court does, ultimately. The argument, by the way, about shrinking is essentially identical to the argument about vacating or revoking monuments. And so I'm wondering how the court can possibly distinguish the two. If one is illegal, I think the other likely is illegal as well. There's another piece of history that I think is worth mentioning. It has to do with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, passed in 1976. And FLIPMA is interesting because it sort of rewrote all the rules on withdrawals. There used to be a lot of legislation involving public land withdrawals. The Secretary could withdraw land. President could withdraw land. And most of these withdrawal authorities were repealed under FLIPMA. The one law, the most important law that was not repealed was the Antiquities Act. Of course, very interesting. And there's language in the House report on the Antiquities Act, excuse me, under FLIPMA, that makes clear that Congress intended to reserve to the Congress the authority to modify and revoke National Monument withdrawals. And so it's pretty explicit. This is in the final report on the FLIPMA bill. Of course, some members of the Supreme Court don't look at legislative history. So it'll be interesting to see whether this plays a role or not. And some have pointed out that the FLIPMA legislative history is not history of the Antiquities Act. And so can we fairly use this legislative history to announce congressional intent? But that's going to be, I think, another interesting aspect of litigation. Just real quickly, I think there's an important policy argument to be made here about one-way withdrawals. You could argue that why would the president get only this one-way authority? But I think if you're thinking about this from the perspective of Congress, Congress wanted to be sure that lands that were threatened and that were at risk would be protected, at least until Congress decided to act. And so reviewing the Antiquities Act is offering one-way protection authority. Makes a lot of sense. Congress can always revoke a national monument. They can always modify a national monument. But in most cases, they actually choose to expand these national monuments, often make them into national parks. There's never been a significant monument that's been overturned by the Congress. So Congress knows how to do this, but they don't do it in part because these monuments tend to become very popular, particularly after they've been around for a while. I think it's just interesting to reflect on the sort of reasons that one might want to view of this authority as being one-way. There's this other issue about the smallest area compatible. Remember that language from the original Antiquities Act that I mentioned? The president is supposed to designate the smallest area compatible with the protection of the objects. The problem is if the object is a landscape, it's really hard to sort of decide what that should look like. And in these cases of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, but Bears Ears in particular, you've got this landscape that was protected largely for the cultural resources that were there. And it seems like it's going to be tough to show that some of that landscape should not be protected to protect the cultural resources that exist in that area. That'll be interesting to watch, but I think that is certainly an issue that the Trump administration seems inclined to want to pursue in the litigation. Finally, I wanna just briefly talk about the fact that we've got sort of an oddball kind of litigation going on here. So some of you know that under the Administrative Procedure Act, the president is not an agency. And so technically at least, the APA does not apply to Antiquities Act litigation. And so we don't really know what the rules are that apply here. What's the standard of review? Is there an administrative record here? And if so, what's the record? How do we decide how the court should handle this? And part of this relates to the fact that we may have some factual issues that are involved here. The legal questions are probably not difficult to resolve. It's a strict legal interpretation by the court. The courts know how to handle that. The factual questions though can be sort of complex. The kinds of issues that I've just been talking about what qualifies as an object of historic or scientific interest? Is it the smallest area compatible with the protection of the objects? Is there a deference standard that should be applied here? We don't really know. And so it's sort of interesting to sort of reflect on what might happen. I think it's likely that the courts are not going to want to get into these issues. I just quote for you some language from the case involving the Grand Teton or the Jackson Hole National Monument. Actually, there was a lawsuit filed over this that was resolved by the district court in Wyoming. And you can see from this quote that the court seems very reluctant to get into the question, to sort of second guess if you will, the president's choice that there was a basis for protecting the objects of historic or scientific interest. And I think that's likely to be the way that future courts view this issue. Just a very difficult question I think for courts to have to intrude upon, particularly when you're talking about a decision by the president. Okay, so that's all I had. Thank you very much for your attention. Happy to answer any questions or hear your comments if you have them. Thank you. You defer to somebody else, but I do have a question. One of the interesting things about these national monuments have been the management structures that have been put in. And maybe you'd say a little bit about some of the innovations that were tried by the Obama administration and how they have fared under the Trump administration. Right, so it's interesting. One of the things that happened during the tenure of Bruce Babbitt, as secretary under Bill Clinton, was that for the first time, national monuments were designated on BLM land. And that was really an innovation. And Babbitt deliberately did this to try to give the BLM, which historically had been derisively known as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining, because of its sort of attention to those interests. Babbitt really thought it was important that the BLM think of itself as a conservation agency as well. And so he purposefully decided to sort of give some of those lands under the jurisdiction of the BLM, some of the monuments that, some of the big landscape monuments, frankly, that were created out of BLM lands. And that led to management plans and the BLM promulgating these management plans for national monuments that were designed in many respects to protect those lands. And it's just been interesting to watch the evolution of these plans. The, you know, if you go to a national park, of course, you go inside the park boundaries and you find the visitor's center and there are millions of people who are enjoying the park. It's a little bit overwhelming. But one of the things that the BLM, I think, has tried to do, sometimes quite successfully, I think, is to leave the visitor's center outside the boundaries of the monument. So the visitor's center, for example, for grand staircases in the town of Escalante. It's a beautiful visitor's center. You can go there and find out all about the monument and then you can go into the monument. And I think it really makes sure that the crowds don't sort of, they're not at right inside the monument, but they're rather in the towns where the towns can get some benefit from that. And we're seeing these management plans, I think, engaging the public about how to manage these lands. So some of the lands are still used for livestock grazing, for example. That's somewhat controversial, particularly in places like the arid deserts in southern Utah, but it's a way for the community to get buy-in, I think, into some of these monuments. And I think it's largely been successful. And over time, as I said, you let these monuments stay in place for 20, 30, 50 years. The public comes around because the public, I think, sees the benefits to their communities or having these monuments there in the community. And I can't emphasize enough the turnaround that happened in Nescalante. You know, after the Grand Staircase Monument was designated by President Clinton, Clinton and Babbit were hung in effigy in the town of Canab, I believe, Utah and southern Utah. And it's just remarkable now that those local communities are not just supporting the monument, but supporting the original boundaries of the monument because they realize what a benefit it has been. It's taken a while. It's taken some time for them to see the benefits, but it's crystal clear. I don't know if any of you have had the pleasure of going down to that area before there was a monument and now after there was a monument, but the change in the economic outlook for those communities is stark and really noticeable, I think. And I think that explains a lot of what's happened there. So these monument plans, I think, are reflecting more and more what the local community wants for their protected lands. Yes. Hi there. Thanks for the great presentation. I was wondering if you've seen any instances in which with the large landscape designation, so going to that smallest area compatible, has there been any corresponding historic property eligibility discussion looking at the boundaries of the property to try to defend that you can't interrupt this landscape because it is a single connected district? I don't believe there's been any case thus far, but that is likely an issue. Well, I should let me back up. So that is certainly one issue that could be discussed in, particularly in Bears Ears, but I think also in Grand Staircase, but as I said right at the end of my presentation, I don't think the court's gonna wanna go there. I think if the court decides to get into these factual kinds of disputes, that it becomes a quagmire. I mean, are you gonna have a hearing? Should we have to rely on the record? That is the proclamation that was set out. It's kind of interesting to note, I worked on some of these monuments during the Clinton administration and we would put together this fairly elaborate bibliography of all the sources that we use to support the claims that we were making about the need to protect certain objects in certain landscapes. Is that part of the record? Much of that was not actually made public. We made public a document that showed the reasons that we did what we decided to do, but I just have a hard time thinking that a court is going to want to hold a factual hearing on whether or not this piece of land should have been included or that piece of land should have been included. I think that quote that I showed you from the Frankie case, the Wyoming case, suggests that that court at least was reluctant to sort of get into that. The court basically suggesting if there's some evidence to support what the president did, we're not gonna go there. And I just think as a practical matter, that's the reaction that most judges would likely have. And so while it's not inconceivable that a court might wanna delve into this, I think it's unlikely. Thanks. Yes. Does the federal government have greater control over licensing within a national monument than it does under other federally owned property? Okay, really good question, I'm glad you asked it. So with that language reserve, so remember that the language under the antiquities act is the president can reserve and that has always been understood to mean that the president can reserve the land, essentially withdraw the land from particular uses. So the standard language, although this wasn't always the case, but the standard language is they're reserving the lands from leasing under the mineral leasing act, from mining under the general mining law. Most of the monuments that were designated during the Clinton and Obama administrations eliminated all new roads, so there could not be new roads within the monuments. So that reserve language has been understood to give the president the authority to ban or to minimize limit certain kinds of activities. In some of the marine monuments, I mentioned the seamounts monument, they banned commercial fishing, for example. When I was working for Bruce Babbitt, we banned fishing in some of the marine monuments off the Virgin Islands. There were some coral reefs that were protected from commercial fishing, and so it's fairly broad, the president basically can do whatever he wants in terms of reserving the lands, and so you need to look at the language of the monuments themselves. The early monument proclamations were pretty vague and pretty open-ended, but I think in more recent years, particularly as I said during the Clinton and Obama monuments, they're fairly specific about what uses are allowed and what uses are not allowed. When I was working on this with the secretary, I would often be tasked with trying to figure out which particular uses we wanted to allow and not allow, and if there were particular areas that we wanted to protect. There were sometimes, for example, rights of way quarters that we would need to protect because there were some existing rights of way or maybe some potential future needs for a right-of-way that we wanted to be sure wouldn't be compromised by the designation of the monument, and so we tried to work with the local communities to make sure that we were reserving certain things that we thought were important, but then leaving open the possibility of uses that the community felt were necessary. Mark. I'm sorry to interrupt, and I appreciate everyone's great questions, but we are out of time. We are out of time. Thank you. But thank you so much, Mark. Thank you.