Federal Judge Blocks Building at U. of California at Berkeley After Environmental Group Sues

To be sure, the University of California at Berkeley faces some uncommon challenges when planning to carve up new land for building. You will recall the tree-sitting incident that delayed construction on an athletic-training center — a protest that ended last year.

Now a federal judge has blocked the university’s plan to build a $113-million, 126,000-square-foot computer research center after environmental groups sued to stop construction, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The environmental group, called Save Strawberry Canyon, argued that because the project would be supported and controlled by the federal government, the construction had to be reviewed under U.S. environmental law, the Chronicle reported. The judge apparently agreed.

This is not the first tactic that Save Strawberry Canyon has used to prevent this development on the site. The group had previously argued that the building would be constructed too close to a fault line.