Posted on April 23, 2026
A U.S. Supreme Court decision has struck a serious blow to Louisiana’s longstanding efforts to hold oil companies responsible for coastal damage, leaving state officials with a stark choice of whether to press ahead with the fight or seek to settle now.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling on Friday was a narrow decision on a technical issue, but its ramifications are potentially vast. Dozens of similar lawsuits from Louisiana parishes are pending, and state officials had hoped to use proceeds from those cases to clean up and restore portions of the rapidly eroding coast.
Gov. Jeff Landry has made no secret of his willingness to settle with the oil companies on fair terms, but the decision may have stripped the state of a portion of its leverage. At the same time, Louisiana still has cards to play, and Attorney General Liz Murrill expressed confidence the state would ultimately prevail.
The result of Friday’s ruling in Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish is that the $745 million verdict in a 2025 state-court trial may be thrown out and the case retried in federal court. It also sets off what could be years of new jurisdictional fighting over where the other cases belong.
It was a clear win for the oil and gas companies, which have spent more than a decade fighting to move the lawsuits out of Louisiana state courts, where juries are drawn from the coastal communities suing them. It gives the industry leverage to argue all of the cases belong in federal court.
Landry, who recently announced a settlement with ConocoPhillips, a defendant in 13 of the 42 coastal lawsuits filed by Louisiana parishes, said Friday he hopes for “a resolution” in the remaining cases.
“Federal court moves faster than state court — those oil and gas companies that want to litigate it, go litigate it,” Landry said. “I wish we could find a resolution. I’m working hard to try to get a resolution.”
Bill Turenne, a Chevron spokesperson, said the company “looks forward to litigating these cases in federal court, where they belong.”
Keith Hall, the director of LSU’s Energy Law Center, said that because the ruling delays potential trials, it could drive down the amount that the oil companies and the state may be willing to settle for.
“That will make them more eager to settle and come out with half a loaf instead of holding out for the whole loaf,” Hall said of the state and the lead attorney for the parishes in the 42 coastal cases, John Carmouche.
Loyola law professor Blaine LeCesne took a different view. The state’s position, he said, isn’t meaningfully weakened by the ruling because the cases will ultimately be heard by Louisiana juries whether they’re in state or federal court.
Those juries have already shown they’re willing to hold oil companies responsible.
“The dynamics of this case are very unique, and the potential legal exposure is not significantly diminished by the change in venue,” LeCesne said. “I would just hold pat and I would negotiate no differently than if these cases were still in state court.”
World War II effort?
The question before the Supreme Court was a procedural one: Does the case belong in state or federal court? To answer that question, it weighed another: Was Chevron’s wartime production of crude oil related to its refining of that oil into aviation fuel, or “avgas,” for the military?
Chevron had a federal contract during World War II to refine crude oil into aviation fuel for the U.S. military, and argued that its crude-oil production in Louisiana was connected closely enough to that work to pull the cases into federal court.
The justices concluded that the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong when it ruled that the case belonged in state court. It sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit to apply the new standard.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed Chevron should win but wrote separately to argue the majority read the law too broadly. In her view, federal contractors should have to show a direct cause-and-effect relationship between their federal duties and what they are sued for. Chevron cleared that higher bar too, she concluded.
As Justice Clarence Thomas described it, the lower court had sided with the parishes because the federal contract “did not specify how to obtain or produce crude oil.” The Supreme Court disagreed, finding a strong enough connection between producing crude oil and refining it into fuel for warplanes to justify hearing the case in federal court.
But the court sought to put guardrails on the ruling, and stressed that it was deciding only the specific case before it — one of 42 related cases — and not resolving whether the others belong in federal court.
That leaves the door open for Carmouche and the parishes to argue that at least some of the remaining Louisiana coastal lawsuits still belong in state court.
In his view, the ruling decided only one case. At most, he said, it could apply to 11 of the 42, which Carmouche called the “refinery cases.”
In those, the same company both drilled the crude oil and refined it into aviation fuel. The others, he said, involved only drilling and crude-oil production, with no connection to the wartime refining work the Supreme Court relied on.
Hall, the LSU law professor, said he thinks the ruling will reach beyond the 11 refinery cases.
“I don’t see how they distinguish it,” he said of the other cases where companies both drilled and had refineries.
‘What they destroyed’
Carmouche said the case had already been tried on the merits and “decided by a jury of Plaquemines Parish residents after hearing the overwhelming evidence of the failure by these companies to repair what they destroyed.”
“The Supreme Court has decided the people of Plaquemines did not have the right to make this decision,” he added. “While we strongly disagree, we accept what the court has said.”
Even so, Carmouche said, he intends to fight to keep the remaining cases in state court while seeking settlements in the cases that can be resolved.
“We’re ready to open the coast for business, and we can’t open it for business with this cloud of liability and the cloud of contamination,” he said. “It’s time for resolution.”
For Mark Davis, a Tulane environmental law professor, the bigger consequence isn’t which courthouse hears the cases. It’s the delay itself.
Louisiana courts have already found oil companies liable, he noted, and the ruling doesn’t change that. But it pushes back the day any of that liability turns into money for coastal restoration.
“It was a good day for delay,” Davis said, “and a bad day for our coast.”
The case has been a rare instance where Louisiana Republicans, including Landry and Murrill, have bucked the Trump administration and its energy-dominance agenda. Trump’s Department of Justice intervened on the side of the oil companies.
Plaquemines Parish President Keith Hinkley echoed the willingness to settle. His parish has always been open to a deal, he said, as long as it’s large enough to fix the damage he believes the oil companies caused.
But he rejected the idea that the companies’ wartime role should exempt them from their responsibility to clean up the coast.
“After World War II, we spent a lot of money in Europe helping rebuild those countries,” he said. “So, hey, federal government, help us rebuild our coast here.”
Staff writer Jonah Meadows contributed to this story.
Email Alex Lubben at alex.lubben@theadvocate.com and follow him on Twitter @alexlubben. His work is supported with a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, administered by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.
