SACRAMENTO, California — The California Supreme Court on Thursday green-lighted a University of California, Berkeley, housing project that has been tangled up in court for years — ruling that a new state law flattened a novel legal argument that noisy student parties count as pollution under environmental law.
The Supreme Court cited the law as it reversed an appellate court ruling and rejected the claims of the opponents, a group called Make UC a Good Neighbor.
“The new law has narrowed the scope of the issues necessary for this Court to resolve,” the high court ruled. “We conclude that, based on the new law, none of Good Neighbor’s claims has merit and we accordingly reverse the Court of Appeal’s judgment.”
An appeals court in 2023 sided with neighbors who had argued that boisterous UC Berkeley parties could produce “noise pollution” that should have been considered in an environmental impact review under the California Environmental Quality Act.
