The U.S. Department of Justice has suffered a string of recent defeats over compensating landowners for the conversion of old railways into public trails, potentially exposing the government to millions of dollars in liability.

Lawyers in the DOJ Environment and Natural Resources Division are fighting on two fronts — in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — to limit the number of future claims in these so-called “rails-to-trails” cases.