Thomas Unlocks Doors to Federal Courts for Suits Against Big Oil

The US Supreme Court cleared some brush on the path to federal court for private parties pursuing federal goals in a transformational and unanimous 8-0 opinion Friday. The case also serves to dissuade states from bringing cases based on corporate conduct retroactively, when the federal government previously sanctioned the activity.

At issue in Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish was the interpretation of the federal officer removal statute, 28 US Section 1442(a)(1), which authorizes removal of state-court suits against federal officers or persons “acting under” them “for or relating to any act under color of such office.”

The Supreme Court clarified that, under this statute, private party defendants have rights to have their claims heard in federal court if the claimed harmful actions even indirectly “relat[e] to” acts or decisions closely connected to the performance of federal duties, including performance under federal contracts or in meeting federal directives and priorities.

Consequently, Chevron can now remove a slew of 42 state court lawsuits brought by Louisiana parishes against it dating to filings as far back as 2013. The cases allege that Chevron and other oil and gas companies, through energy production activities including those relating to federal contracts and demands, are responsible for coastal land loss and increased hurricane vulnerability. The lawsuits seek damages and remediation funding.

As I’ve written before, “Louisiana is becoming a battleground for lawfare,” with its governor and the state attorney general’s office supporting the plaintiffs “advancing creative lawsuits for ‘land loss’—cases that are pressing courts to accept tenuous theories of liability.”

In the opinion Friday, the Supreme Court held that the statute allows removal of these cases to federal court because the federal government has encouraged Chevron’s and others’ crude-oil production, including the refinement of crude oil into aviation gasoline necessary to fuel US military efforts to win World War II.

With implications beyond the facts of this case, the Supreme Court’s textualist interpretation of the statute concluded that the “phrase ‘relating to’ sweeps broadly” and one “thing can relate to another even if the connection is ‘indirect.’”

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion, elaborated that a strict causal relationship wasn’t required for removal. “One thing can relate to another even if it was ‘not specifically designed to affect’ it,” he wrote.

Applying the interpretation to the facts, the Supreme Court concluded that “Chevron has plausibly alleged a close relationship between its challenged conduct and the performance of its federal duties—not a tenuous, remote, or peripheral one.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred but would have preferred a test with a stricter causal requirement. Yet here, she found that the actions of Chevron at issue in this case triggered the federal removal statute because they met her stricter standard for “relating to.”

The Supreme Court’s ordinary meaning analysis wasn’t just a sound textualist interpretation. It was also a decision that supports the purposes of the federal officer removal statute. Plaintiffs shouldn’t be permitted to file lawsuits in state court that attempt to undermine or punish those who advance federally authorized or encouraged activities within the federal government’s constitutional authority.

Federalism isn’t a system of states’ rights. We have a constitutional system of carefully allocated powers, duties, and obligations between the states and the federal government.

Within it, the federal government can do things like set energy and wartime policies. The federal removal statute guards the allocation by ensuring that state courts can’t be used to even potentially frustrate actions that, within the careful distribution of power, are in the federal government’s bucket.

After Friday’s decision in Plaquemines Parish, federal contractors of all types—not just energy companies—doing work at the direction of the federal government can now have more appropriate protection in litigation based on past conduct.

The Louisiana parish cases will now proceed in federal court, likely with dispositive motions before reaching the merits. There are myriad reasons the federal court should dismiss these cases outright, including the due process retroactivity claims and other defenses.

But if it gets to the merits, these cases represent agenda-driven attacks on energy more than they do credible claims of wrongdoing. The real causes of the coastal erosion and land loss aren’t the companies’ energy activity, but more realistically the re-direction of the levees, weather events and storms, and other natural causes.

One can only hope that the federal courts will recognize those infirmities, lest the destructive signal be sent that what is lawful today might, with changing winds, be recognized as generating liability tomorrow. An embrace of retroactive liability would be an attack on the rule of law that creates systematic disincentivizing of productive activity and innovation.

While Justice Thomas’ opinion and analysis in Plaquemines Parish itself isn’t about the illegitimacy of imposing retroactive liability, the facts he lays out clearly indicate the lawfulness, utility, and national defense necessity of Chevron and other oil producers and refiners in Louisiana during World War II.

One cannot read those facts and logically think that the actors should now be punished for what they did. While not the main tune of the decision, the retroactivity concern sings from its pages.

The case is Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, U.S., No. 24-813, decided 4/17/26.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Donald J. Kochan is a professor and the executive director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

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