American Lands Council updates Mohave County on Utah v. United States and proposed state land transfers

Jennifer Fielder, chief executive officer of the American Lands Council and a former Montana state senator, gave a remote presentation to the Mohave County Public Lands and Recreation Commission on Jan. 2 about litigation and legislative efforts to transfer certain federal lands to states.

Fielder said the central legal matter is Utah v. United States, a suit Utah filed on Aug. 20, 2024, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the federal government may indefinitely retain unappropriated Bureau of Land Management land inside state borders. "The simple premise is statehood equality," Fielder told commissioners, summarizing the suit's legal theory and the long history behind it.

Why it matters: Fielder said the court's decision could affect tens of millions of acres in Western states. She told the commission that Utah was focused on about 18,500,000 acres inside its borders and that the constitutional question could apply to roughly 200,000,000 acres of BLM land across the West. Mohave County was among local governments that have supported the legal work; Fielder said Mohave County previously contributed to litigation and joined an amicus brief filed by the American Lands Council.

Fielder described two tracks of work. The first is litigation: Utah asked the Supreme Court to take the case under its original jurisdiction; the U.S. government filed a brief opposing Utah on Nov. 21, 2024, and a motion to intervene was filed by a Ute tribe, she said. The court was expected to decide in January whether…