19 States File Supreme Court Complaint over Efforts by Other States to Regulate Interstate Gas Emissions

Yesterday 19 States filed a complaint in the Supreme Court against five other States that alleges that those states have unlawfully allowed state tort actions governed by state law in state court to impose ruinous liability on energy companies based on out-of-state conduct with out-of-state effects. These defendant States, the complaint in Alabama v. California charges, are regulating interstate gas emissions that are properly in the exclusive domain of federal law.

The complaint in Alabama v. California raises the same legal issue that is at stake in Sunoco’s pending certiorari petition in Sunoco v. City of Honolulu, which I wrote about here. Briefing on that petition is now complete, and it is scheduled to be decided at the Court’s conference on June 6. If the Court grants review of the petition and decides Sunoco’s case, it would almost certainly resolve the States’ legal dispute in the process and thus have no need to decide Alabama v. California. That is yet another reason that the Court should grant Sunoco’s petition.

The plaintiff States that are invoking the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction are Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. (The States include their complaint in their “motion for leave to file bill of complaint.”) The five States that are being sued are California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.