By Joe Cunningham -RedState.com
The Supreme Court handed environmental plaintiffs a unanimous defeat on Friday, ruling that Chevron USA can fight its Louisiana coastal damage lawsuit in federal court rather than the sympathetic state-court venue that produced a nearly three-quarter-billion-dollar verdict against the company.
The 8-0 decision in Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish vacated a Fifth Circuit ruling and remanded the case back to the lower courts. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion, joined by six colleagues; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred in the judgment separately. Justice Samuel Alito took no part in the case, having recused himself due to his financial interest in ConocoPhillips, the parent of Burlington Resources Oil and Gas Co., which remained a party in the underlying lower court proceedings.
What the Case Was Actually About
Plaquemines Parish filed one of 42 state-court suits in 2013 against oil and gas companies under Louisiana’s State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act, a 1978 law that governs uses of the state’s coastal zone. The parishes alleged that certain oil production operations (some dating back to the 1940s) were conducted without proper permits or were “illegally commenced” and therefore not protected by the law’s grandfather clause for pre-1980 operations.
The twist: much of the challenged conduct happened during World War II, when Chevron’s predecessor, the Texas Company, was operating under a federal contract to refine crude oil into aviation gasoline (”avgas”) for the U.S. military. The federal government, through the Petroleum Administration for War, had taken direct control of the oil industry to fuel the war effort, directing production methods, allocating crude oil to specific refineries, and pushing companies to maximize output by any means necessary.