Filling the Enforcement Gap: The Plaintiff’s Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act Citizen Suit in 2026

Allan Kanner, Founder | Kanner & Whiteley, L.L.C.

Allan Kanner litigates environmental cases on behalf of public entities and conservation organizations. He is co-counsel to Conservation Law Foundation in CLF v. Pike Fuels Limited Partnership, a Clean Water Act citizen suit in which the District of Connecticut granted summary judgment in July 2026 on a continuing violation at a New Haven Harbor petroleum terminal, and he represents Conservation Law Foundation in its case against ExxonMobil over climate change effects. He founded Kanner & Whiteley in New Orleans in 1981 and has built a national practice in complex litigation, environmental law, and consumer fraud.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Kanner earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1979, where he served as Senior Comments Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review and Staff Editor of the Harvard International Law Journal, and he pursued graduate study in philosophy at Harvard University. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and the Philomathean Literary Honor Society. After law school he clerked for Judge Robert S. Vance of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He is admitted to practice in California, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and the federal courts of Puerto Rico.

• Recognition & Leadership

Chambers and Partners has ranked Mr. Kanner in Environmental Law for sixteen years through 2025, and The Best Lawyers in America has listed him from 2019 through 2027 in Environmental Law, Commercial Litigation, Mass Tort Litigation/Class Actions (Plaintiffs), and Consumer Protection Law. The National Law Journal named his firm Environmental Protection Law Firm of the Year in its 2020 Elite Trial Lawyers awards. He has been named to the Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers for 2025 and 2026 and the Lawdragon 500 Leading Consumer Plaintiff Lawyers from 2017 through 2026, and he was inducted into the Lawdragon Hall of Fame in 2022. Law360 profiled him as a Titan of the Plaintiffs Bar in 2014. He has held Martindale-Hubbell’s AV rating since 1987 and has been listed in Louisiana Super Lawyers since 2007.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Kanner has chaired the Environmental Litigation Trial Practice Sub-Committee of the American Bar Association since 2006 and has been a member of the American Law Institute since 2012. He served on the Sedona Conference Advisory Board from 2006 to 2022, chairing it in 2007, and he was selected by his peers to co-chair the American Association for Justice’s Business Interruption Litigation Task Force. He served on the AAJ Board of Governors from 2008 to 2011 and as President of the Louisiana Association for Justice in 2008–2009. He has taught at Tulane Law School, Duke University, Yale University, and the University of Texas, and he was the Distinguished Practitioner Lecturer at Mississippi College School of Law in 2015. He is a frequent speaker on natural resource damage trials and litigation strategy, including at Law Seminars International, New Jersey State Bar Association, and ABA programs, and he has testified before the Louisiana Legislature and the U.S. Senate.

• Experience

Mr. Kanner’s environmental practice centers on enforcement and natural resource damage litigation for governments and public interest organizations. Beyond the Conservation Law Foundation matters, he currently represents the State of New Mexico in PFAS contamination litigation against the U.S. Air Force and the State of Vermont in PFAS contamination matters. He represented the State of Louisiana in the Deepwater Horizon litigation, which produced the largest natural resource damage and economic loss settlement on record and the single largest state NRD recovery, and he represented New Jersey in the largest NRD settlement in that state’s history. He is the author of Environmental and Toxic Tort Trials (2nd ed., LexisNexis) and more than sixty scholarly articles, including PFAS and the Government Contractor Defense (Environmental Law Reporter, May 2026), Tortious Interference with Public Trust, Environmental Gatekeepers, and Unjust Enrichment in Environmental Litigation, and he contributed the chapter on tort remedies and litigation strategies to The Law of Environmental Justice. His broader practice includes class actions and consumer protection, including service as lead trial counsel in Bonilla v. Trebol Motors, a civil RICO class action that produced a $129 million jury verdict, and as lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the Dollar General motor oil multidistrict litigation.

Derek Teaney, Deputy Director | Appalachian Mountain Advocates

Derek Teaney litigates Clean Water Act citizen suits and related enforcement actions for conservation groups across Appalachia. He argued West Virginia Rivers Coalition v. The Chemours Company FC, LLC before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on behalf of the Rivers Coalition, the Clean Water Act citizen suit over PFAS discharges that the court decided on June 3, 2026, and in 2024 he represented the West Virginia Rivers Coalition and other groups in a federal citizen suit alleging that EPA violated the Clean Water Act in its oversight of the Lower Guyandotte River watershed. He has described citizen suits as a crucial tool for environmental protection, designed by Congress so that private attorneys general can act when regulators do not.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Teaney graduated first in his class from Lewis & Clark Law School in 2004, where he served as Editor in Chief of Environmental Law, the school’s environmental law journal, and received the 2004 Bernard O’Rourke Award for Outstanding Writing. He holds a B.A. from the University of San Diego. After law school he clerked for Judge Rex E. Armstrong of the Oregon Court of Appeals. He has argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in published cases spanning nearly a decade, including Sierra Club v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (2018), Appalachian Voices v. Mountain Valley Pipeline (2023), West Virginia Rivers Coalition v. The Chemours Company (2026), and Sierra Club v. North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (2026), and he has appeared as counsel before the Supreme Court of the United States in Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC v. The Wilderness Society (2023).

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Teaney joined Appalachian Mountain Advocates in 2006 as an Equal Justice Works Fellow and became a permanent member of the staff when the two-year fellowship ended. He now serves as the organization’s Deputy Director, working from its Lewisburg, West Virginia office. A ninth-generation West Virginian, he has been featured in Lewis & Clark Law School’s Advocate Magazine for his work protecting the people and places of Appalachia, and he has been quoted on citizen-suit enforcement and mountaintop removal litigation by E&E News, Bloomberg Law, and the Herald-Dispatch. In 2018 he argued and won Sierra Club v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in which the Fourth Circuit vacated the Corps’ Clean Water Act verification for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in its entirety.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Teaney is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law, where he teaches the Environmental Litigation Practicum and prepares the next generation of Appalachian lawyers for environmental practice. He has represented coalitions of conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, in federal appellate litigation over Clean Water Act permits and certifications, and he has worked alongside counsel from the Southern Environmental Law Center and Public Justice in those matters. Earlier in his career he helped bring the first lawsuit to enforce a Clean Water Act Section 401 water quality certification, and he was part of the Appalachian Mountain Advocates team whose litigation contributed to a Justice Department settlement requiring Alpha Natural Resources to pay more than $27 million for thousands of Clean Water Act violations.

• Experience

Mr. Teaney has extensive experience in federal trial and appellate courts. In addition to the Chemours and Lower Guyandotte matters, he and colleague Mike Becher filed a 2019 lawsuit on behalf of several environmental groups that led to later court consequences for Lexington Coal Company, and in January 2023 he argued before the Fourth Circuit on behalf of the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, and other conservation groups challenging the Virginia State Water Control Board’s Clean Water Act water quality certification for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Earlier in his career, working with Joe Lovett at Appalachian Mountain Advocates, he helped negotiate the 2012 settlement under which Patriot Coal agreed to phase out mountaintop removal and other forms of strip mining in West Virginia. His work has also included representing an organic farmer opposing a 36-inch natural gas pipeline across her land and pressing a coal company to stop discharging toxins into streams around its mines.

SESSION 1 – Pleading Around the Diligent-Prosecution Bar and the Circuit Split on State-Permit Remedies in Citizen Suits | Derek Teaney | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

This session examines the threshold obstacles facing plaintiff’s counsel in Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act citizen suits in 2026, beginning with the diligent-prosecution bar. Attorneys will learn how to draft NOIs and complaints to survive jurisdiction-specific diligent-prosecution challenges, how to assess circuit-specific risk on the comparability and timing questions, and how the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in Port of Tacoma v. Puget Soundkeeper Alliance—allowing enforcement of state-law-only permit conditions—shapes where and how a citizen suit is filed. Attendees will leave with concrete pleading frameworks, NOI drafting checklists, and a current map of the circuit split governing when and how state enforcement actions foreclose citizen-suit remedies.

BREAK | 1:00pm – 1:10pm

SESSION 2 – Proving Penalties, Irreparable Harm, and Fee Recovery in Citizen Suit Enforcement | Allan Kanner | 1:10pm – 2:10pm

This session covers the three core remedial battlegrounds in Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act citizen suits: calculating and proving civil penalties, establishing irreparable harm for injunctive relief in light of the Fourth Circuit’s June 2026 Chemours decision, and recovering attorney fees and litigation costs under the CWA § 505(d) and CAA § 304(d) fee-shifting framework. Attorneys will learn how courts apply the economic-benefit methodology for penalties, why the Chemours holding requires individualized member harm evidence rather than reliance on permit violations alone, and how Buckhannon’s judicially-sanctioned-change requirement governs fee recovery strategy. Practitioners gain the analytical tools to build a complete remedial record from filing through judgment in citizen suit enforcement.