A Supreme Court ruling Friday could make it easier for federal contractors and other private parties to move lawsuits against them to federal court, delaying proceedings and securing venues they see as more favorable to their arguments.
In an 8-0 decision, the justices found that Chevron U.S.A. met legal requirements to transfer a yearslong dispute over its responsibility for Louisiana’s eroding coastline from state to federal court under the federal officer removal statute. The law allows private entities like Chevron that are acting under the direction of the federal government to be heard before a federal bench.
The decision in Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish reverses rulings from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and a federal district court.
“Chevron’s case fits comfortably within the ordinary meaning of a suit ‘relating to’ the performance of federal duties,” said Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned the majority opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred with the judgment in the case but did not sign on to Thomas’ opinion.
“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,” Thomas continued.
The dispute reached the Supreme Court after Louisiana parishes and the state sued the oil major for allegedly failing to obtain a state permit for oil drilling after the 1980 enactment of Louisiana’s State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act. The law prohibited certain uses of Louisiana’s coastal zone, including oil production, without a permit. They claimed the case belonged before a state bench, because the case involved issues of state law.
Chevron applauded the finding that the lawsuits belong in federal court.
“As the court recognized, the plaintiffs’ claims are related to activities that Chevron and other energy companies performed under federal supervision during World War II,” said spokesperson Bill Turenne. “Those claims are flawed as a matter of both state law and federal law, and Chevron looks forward to litigating these cases in federal court, where they belong.”
Attorneys for the parishes could not be immediately reached for comment on the decision.
Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill expressed confidence the state would ultimately prevail in its challenge.
“A jury in one of the most conservative, pro-oil and gas communities in the country found that Chevron was liable for billions of gallons of toxic waste dumped into the Louisiana marsh,” she said in an emailed statement, referencing a state court ruling in 2025 awarding parishes $744 million in damages.
“It doesn’t matter whether this case is in state court or federal court—I am confident the outcome will be the same.”
The Chevron case was one of dozens of similar challenges against oil majors filed more than a decade ago. Some of those disputes are now being settled outside of court with the state.
The company argued that its drilling activity stemmed from a federal directive to produce aviation gas, or avgas, during World War II, and so should be decided by a federal court.
While the oil majors’ opponents sought to distinguish oil drilling from federal contracts to produce the fuel, the argument failed to convince the high court.
But Thomas made clear that “relating to” does not encompass every act, citing earlier rulings that held that “the ordinary understanding of ‘relating to’ requires a connection that is not ‘tenuous, remote, or peripheral.’“
He noted, “ordinary readers would not understand the statement that someone is ‘related to Joe’ to refer to a mutual tie to Adam and Eve,’“ Nor, he wrote, would they tie “the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings to ‘relate to’ the next week’s weather.”
Chief Justice John Roberts raised the butterfly effect during oral arguments in January, noting that a broad interpretation would make it difficult to tell which entities could say they were doing government work.
“It’s hard to see where you stop,” Roberts said at the time. “I mean, is it the butterfly effect? The butterfly flaps its wings, and it has the end result halfway around the world?”
Thomas wrote that an ordinary reader, “would not understand the federal officer removal statute to reach all suits with any attenuated connection to federal duties.”
He cited as an example a D.C. Circuit court ruling that he said held that a “false advertising suit targeting an oil company’s statements to consumers about the future effects of fossil fuels on climate change did not relate to its decades-earlier production for the government.”
The decision is also a win for the Trump administration, which sided with industry and argued that the federal officer statute protects the federal government from interference by state courts.
Aaron Roper, assistant to the solicitor general, called the case a “poster child” for the government’s “deep concerns” about state court interference during oral arguments in January,
In a separate concurrence, Jackson agreed with the judgment but said she disagreed with the conclusion that the federal officer removal statute’s “for or relating to” language requires only an indirect relationship between the conduct targeted by the lawsuit and the asserted federal duties.
“In my view, the statute demands more,” she wrote, adding that, however, she agreed Chevron satisfied the need for a “causal nexus” between the conduct and the federal duties.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from the case, citing financial interest in ConocoPhillips, the parent company of Burlington Resources Oil & Gas Co., one of the companies that initially joined Chevron’s case, along with the Texas Co. and Exxon Mobil.
The subsidiary withdrew from the dispute before the court last June agreed to take up the case, but the Supreme Court said in January that the company remained a defendant in the district court.
The decision drew praise from the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, which joined an industry amicus brief in support of Chevron’s case.
“The Supreme Court made official what we’ve already known. These misguided lawsuits never belonged in state court,” said the association’s president, Tommy Faucheux, in a statement following the ruling.
“Hopefully, the state will take this opportunity to bring these suits to an end so we can collectively focus on the energy opportunities that lie ahead for Louisiana,” he said.
