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In April 1791 an action of ejectment was commenced in a Virginia district court held at Winchester for recovery of land within the Northern Neck tract. Denny Fairfax, a British subject holding under the devise of Thomas Lord Fairfax, was admitted to defend upon the usual terms of confessing lease, entry and ouster. The facts were reduced to a case agreed and treated as a special verdict. On 24 April 1794 the district court entered judgment for the defendant. The plaintiff appealed to the Court of Appeals of Virginia, the highest court of law in the state. At its April term in 1810 that court reversed the district court judgment and entered judgment for the plaintiff. The case was then removed into the Supreme Court of the United States. At February term 1813 the Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals judgment and issued a mandate directing that its judgment be carried into execution. The Court of Appeals unanimously declined to obey the mandate. It entered judgment declaring that the Supreme Court's appellate power did not extend to it under the Constitution, that section 25 of the Judiciary Act was not in pursuance of the Constitution, that the writ of error had been improvidently allowed, and that proceedings in the Supreme Court were coram non judice. A second writ of error was brought to the Supreme Court. The underlying facts agreed by the parties show that Lord Fairfax, a citizen and inhabitant of Virginia, died in December 1781 seized of approximately 300,000 acres in the Northern Neck. By his will he devised the lands in fee to his nephew Denny Martin, later Denny Fairfax, a native-born British subject who resided in England until his death between 1796 and 1803 and who never became a citizen of the United States. In 1789 the Governor of Virginia issued a patent granting a portion of the land, described as waste and ungranted and never escheated, to David Hunter, a Virginia citizen, pursuant to a treasury warrant dated 23 January 1788. The case agreed also incorporates the definitive treaty of peace of 1783, the treaty of amity of 1794, and the several Virginia statutes concerning land grants and escheats.

In 1967 the Atomic Energy Commission granted Vermont Yankee a construction permit for a nuclear power plant in Vernon, Vermont, after the required adjudicatory hearing and reviews. Vermont Yankee later applied for an operating license; NRDC intervened and objected to exclusion of fuel-reprocessing and waste-disposal impacts from the hearing. In November 1972 the Commission opened a separate rulemaking proceeding on those fuel-cycle issues, noticed two alternative approaches based on its Environmental Survey, and conducted a February 1973 hearing at which more than forty participants submitted comments but no discovery or cross-examination occurred. In April 1974 the Commission adopted a rule assigning numerical values to fuel-cycle impacts and applied it prospectively. In January 1969 Consumers Power applied for permits to build two nuclear reactors in Midland, Michigan. After staff and ACRS review, Saginaw and Mapleton intervened and raised 119 environmental contentions, including seventeen on energy conservation. The Licensing Board held hearings on radiological issues, the staff issued a final environmental impact statement in March 1972, and further hearings occurred in May and June 1972; Saginaw declined to participate in the later hearings or submit proposed findings. The Licensing Board granted the construction permit, the Appeal Board affirmed, and the Commission declined further review. In November 1973 the Commission ruled in another case that energy-conservation evidence meeting threshold tests could be considered, but it later refused Saginaw's motion to reopen the Consumers Power record. NRDC appealed the Vermont Yankee license and rule to the D.C. Circuit; Saginaw and others appealed the Consumers Power permit. In 1976 the Court of Appeals remanded both matters, holding the fuel-cycle rulemaking procedures inadequate, the Consumers Power environmental impact statement defective for omitting energy conservation, and the ACRS report insufficiently explained. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in 1977. The Commission is the successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission under the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974. All licensing proceedings followed the two-stage process of construction permit followed by operating license under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, with NEPA environmental reviews added after 1969.