The nation’s highest bench will hear arguments in late February over the continued operation of an oil pipeline in the Great Lakes and an energy giant’s fight over assets it lost during the Cuban Revolution.
With the support of the Trump administration behind them, lawyers for Exxon Mobil will appear before the Supreme Court on Feb. 23 to argue that the Cuban government did not properly compensate the oil company for $70 million (in 1960 dollars) of assets seized by Fidel Castro’s government.
The case, Exxon v. Corporación Cimex, centers on the Helms-Burton Act, which allows legal challenges against the alleged “trafficking” of property confiscated during the Cuban Revolution. The statute does, however, allow the president to find that blocking such lawsuits is in the national interest.
Since the passage of the law in 1996, every president has reached such a finding — until President Donald Trump allowed the litigation suspension to lapse in 2019.
