In most of the major U.S. cities, both the capacity and availability of solid waste landfill sites are declining. One option for increasing landfill capacity has been to build landfills to greater heights and new sites are being planned to store refuse to unprecedented heights. This situation has raised concerns by many state and federal regulators regarding the stability of high refuse fill under static and dynamic loading conditions. This paper includes: ∎ a critical evaluation of the published and unpublished studies on the shear strength properties of refuse and settlement characteristics of refuse fills. ∎ a discussion of the inadequacy of the Mohr-Coulomb theory to account for the large, yet non catastrophic deformations that refuse undergoes. ∎ a presentation of a new approach to stability analysis based on the bearing capacity and settlement criteria of landfills ∎ an examination of the dynamic strength properties of refuse fills, including recently reported field shear wave data and a deformation analysis approach for evaluating stability when earthquake motions pass through a high landfill.