President Joe Biden’s restoration of the original boundaries of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments will leave untested for now whether his predecessor’s decision to shrink the monuments is legal, attorneys said Friday.
Few lawyers are expecting the central legal question over a president’s authority under the Antiquities Act to be resolved anytime soon.
Litigation challenging President Donald Trump’s actions are likely moot, meaning the question of whether a president can shrink or abolish a previous president’s national monument designation will remain unresolved for years, said David McDonald, a Mountain States Legal Foundation attorney representing Kane County, Utah. ...