Judge’s Recusal Isn’t Needed After Ex-Firm’s Deepwater Cases

A US judge did not need to recuse himself from cases over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill despite his former law firm’s previous work on the case, a US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit panel ruled.

The New Orleans-based appeals court on Friday affirmed the decision by US District Judge Barry Ashe of the Eastern District of Louisiana to not step away from the cases. The appellate panel said there was “no evidence” that Ashe previously worked on the litigation when New Orleans law firm Stone Pigman represented a decade earlier Cameron International, the manufacturer of a ...