Ninth Circuit decisions as lacking a basis in the law, two of which—Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center, 133 S. Ct. 1326 (2013), and U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council, 133 S. Ct. 2843 (2013)—were later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Smith wrote an opinion for a unanimous panel concluding that pollution exceedances detected at monitoring stations of the County of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Flood Control District were sufficient to establish the County's liability under the Clean Water Act. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the opinion. Smith wrote for a unanimous panel that environmental organizations lacked standing to challenge regulators' failure to define greenhouse gas emissions limits because the nexus between the harm and the desired regulation was too attenuated, in part because there was no evidence that the desired limitations would curb a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Immigration Gonzales v. Barr (9th Cir. 2020). Smith ruled in a 2-1 decision that aliens who have been detained for six months or more must be granted bond hearings. The majority rejected the government's argument that it could deny bond hearings, explaining that the bond hearings must be granted under existing precedent. Dawson v. Garland (9th Cir. 2021). Smith dissented in a 2-1 decision where the majority denied relief to Karlena Dawson, a refugee from Jamaica. Smith would have granted relief because "Post issuance of the protection order, the physical abuse Dawson suffered may have diminished, but Hinds remained obsessively fixated on stalking her, hurting her, and even killing her, which by themselves constitute torture." Labor, employment, and antitrust Smith, writing for a divided panel, held that the Federal Arbitration Act did not preempt California's rule that barred waiver of representative claims under its Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA). Smith held that a California employee bringing an action under PAGA does so as a proxy for the state's labor law enforcement agencies; that, "[a]s the California Supreme Court has explained, a PAGA action is a form of qui tam action"; and that "[t]he FAA was not intended to preclude states from authorizing qui tam actions to enforce state law." Smith, on behalf of a unanimous panel, affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court's dismissal of an action challenging, on antitrust and labor law grounds, a Seattle ordinance authorizing a collective-bargaining process between ridesharing companies, such as Uber and Lyft,