The first Monday in October brings the new Supreme Court term and, with it, the first day of oral arguments.<\/p>\n
The opening case is Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County<\/a>, on whether state-tort claims against energy companies brought by the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, are preempted by federal law. It\u2019s a big case, with potentially significant implications.<\/p>\n Before argument begins, Justice Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s wife, Ashley Kavanaugh, and his parents, Everett and Martha Kavanaugh, arrive to take seats in the justices\u2019 guest box.<\/p>\n Also here are three Boulder County commissioners \u2013 Ashely Stolzmann, Marta Loachamin, and Claire Levy, as well as Boulder City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde. They will make brief remarks to the press on the court\u2019s plaza after the arguments. Here as well are Suncor General Counsel Mike Korenblat and ExxonMobil General Counsel Jeffrey Taylor. They will not go to the plaza.<\/p>\n At 10 a.m., the justices take the bench, except for Justice Samuel Alito, of course. He announced<\/a> last week that he would no longer participate in Suncor. Some advocacy groups had called for his recusal based on his ownership of individual energy stocks, though not of Suncor or ExxonMobil.<\/p>\n Alito told Bloomberg\u2019s Greg Stohr last week, an interview tied to Tuesday\u2019s release of his book \u201cSo Ordered: An Originalist\u2019s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country<\/a>,\u201d that he felt it was \u201cprudent\u201d to withdraw even though the court\u2019s legal office had advised him recusal was not required.<\/p>\n One question debated among a certain especially law-nerdy set of observers, possibly just a couple of us here at SCOTUSblog, was whether the court would switch the order of today\u2019s cases because of the late recusal. The court\u2019s preferred custom is that when a justice is recused and there is more than one case being argued in a day, the case with the recusal will go second so the non-participating justice can slip out relatively quietly in the short break between cases.<\/p>\n But Suncor was seemingly scheduled as a high-profile term opener (and touted as such in many a term preview session). The court evidently decided not to disrupt the narrative.<\/p>\n The chief justice opens with some traditional business: \u201cI have the honor to announce, on behalf of the court, that the October 2025 Term of the Supreme Court of the United States is now closed, and the October 2026 Term is now convened.\u201d<\/p>\n During bar admissions, one movant departs from the short, scripted motion to tout his \u201cfellow Marine\u201d who will \u201cmake a great ambassador for the court.\u201d The chief justice does not seem amused by the ad lib.<\/p>\n Among the groups being admitted today are several graduates of the University of the District of Columbia\u2019s David A. Clarke School of Law, where Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson last month received a raucous welcome for her speech and conversation<\/a> about the emergency docket, and a group from the U.S. House office of legislative counsel, whose members\u2019 ears will perk up during the Suncor arguments and its many mentions of the potential role of Congress in regulating greenhouse gas emissions.<\/p>\n Roberts then calls the Suncor case for \u201cargument first this term.\u201d<\/p>\n Amy Howe has this site\u2019s main account<\/a> of the argument. To me, it was clear from early on that the question presented that the court added to the case, about whether it has jurisdiction over a Colorado Supreme Court decision that arguably isn\u2019t final, was more than just a formality.<\/p>\n Justice Clarence Thomas asks Kannon Shanmugam, the lawyer representing Suncor and ExxonMobil, the defendants in Boulder city and county\u2019s lawsuit, to \u201cspend some time and explain why we have jurisdiction.\u201d<\/p>\n Shanmugam was then forced to spend almost all of his allotted 20 minutes of traditional time on the jurisdiction question.<\/p>\n When Justice Elena Kagan suggests that he was switching back and forth between two theories of jurisdiction that were perhaps in tension with each other and so he should maybe choose one, Shanmugan says, \u201cLike my children, I love both of our theories equally, Justice Kagan.\u201d<\/p>\n She doesn\u2019t seem amused and continues to press him.<\/p>\n Only when he gets to the seriatim round does Shanmugam get to expound on the merits, though this is after Roberts turns to Thomas, who has no further questions, and then reflexively turns to Alito\u2019s chair (which also has no questions).<\/p>\n Before his time is up, Shanmugam is able to make a sweeping point that more than 60 municipalities across the country have filed some three dozen similar lawsuits seeking to hold oil and gas companies liable for damages related to greenhouse gas emissions.<\/p>\n \u201cI would submit that, given the extraordinary magnitude of these cases, where, in each of these cases, plaintiffs are seeking billions of dollars of damages, that we need an answer to this question sooner rather than later,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Sarah Harris, the current principal deputy solicitor general arguing in support of the petitioners, argues that the Colorado Supreme Court treated the case as a self-contained original proceeding, and thus the U.S. Supreme Court has jurisdiction to review that court\u2019s ruling allowing the lawsuit to proceed.<\/p>\n Kevin Russell, representing the two Boulders and their officials, makes a few merits points before saying, \u201call of this must await another case because petitioners have failed to establish this Court’s jurisdiction to hear this interlocutory appeal.\u201d<\/p>\n Roberts, who had suggested to Harris that this suit may not be different from other mass tort suits the Supreme Court has allowed to proceed in state court, takes a more skeptical tone with Russell.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you prevail, the next day, a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit\u2014they\u2019ll probably copy your pleadings\u2014and then there will be at least 50, you know, different cities\u2019 \u2026 causes of action filed,\u201d the chief justice says. \u201c[H]ow do you think that will work out on the ground?\u201d<\/p>\n Russell responds calmly, giving a little but saying, \u201cthe mere fact that \u2026 there could be a lot of litigation, I don’t think there\u2019s anything in the Constitution that says preemption arises from whenever, you know, a state law, if copied in other states, could cause a lot of litigation.\u201d<\/p>\n On rebuttal, Shanmugam takes one more stab at emphasizing the scope of the climate lawsuits that he is hoping the court will nip in the bud.<\/p>\n \u201cThe breadth of Boulder’s theory here is astonishing,\u201d he says, \u201c[t]here is no limit under Boulder’s theory on who could be sued.\u201d<\/p>\n Under the lawsuit\u2019s theory, he adds, \u201cBoulder could tag me with personal jurisdiction when I am in Colorado in two weeks and sue me on a nuisance claim for refilling my car and thereby contributing to global climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n Shanmugam concludes by saying, \u201c[T]his case and others like it reflect an all-too-regrettable trend of trying to resolve major political issues in court rather than leaving them to the political branches where they belong. Climate change is certainly one of the most pressing issues of the day, but we would submit that this is exactly the wrong way to go about resolving it.\u201d<\/p>\n With that, Roberts says the case is submitted, and many in the courtroom stand to leave.<\/p>\n During this commotion, Alito slips in from the center curtain with a slight smile on his face and moves to his place on the bench. During the next argument<\/a>, on veterans\u2019 benefits<\/a>, he will be back at home asking tough questions of counsel, rather than sitting around in his chambers, or perhaps worse, answering questions from news reporters, even if it is to promote his book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first Monday in October brings the new Supreme Court term and, with it, the first day of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":872116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88,8306,357041,367404],"class_list":["post-872115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-open","tag-post-type-post","tag-view-from-the-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/872116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}