"John Sturgeon worried he was jinxing himself when he fixed up the mothballed hovercraft in his garage without knowing whether the Supreme Court would let him pilot it to his favorite moose-hunting grounds in Alaska.

"But I actually put it in my garage, and I've been working on it all winter," he told E&E News this morning. He put a new engine in it last week.

The gamble paid off. The Supreme Court today ruled unanimously in favor of Sturgeon, the Alaska man at the center of a 12-year battle over hovercraft and federal regulations.

While some court watchers have dismissed the case as a novelty issue, the legal fight involves important debates on public lands, federalism and water rights that caught the Supreme Court's attention on two separate occasions (Greenwire, Nov. 2, 2018)."

Ellen M. Gilmer reports for Greenwire March 26, 2019. [2]