ExxonMobil Corporation, et al. v. Environment Texas Citizen Lobby, Incorporated, et al.

The fractured, en banc Fifth Circuit decision below affirmed liability in one of the largest Clean Air Act (CAA) citizen-suit cases of all time, authorizing millions of dollars in civil penalties against petitioners. But for the vast majority of those penalties, plaintiffs—respondents here—never traced their alleged injuries to an actual legal violation by ExxonMobil—as distinct from the thousands of pounds of lawful emissions that ExxonMobil daily produced or emissions from other companies. And plaintiffs and their members will never see a penny of those penalties, which are payable only to the U.S. Treasury. The upshot is that ExxonMobil has been ordered to pay civil penalties that plaintiffs will never receive, for harms that were never traced to any legal violations by ExxonMobil—a result that Judge Jones, in dissent, aptly described as “disastrous for future litigants.” App.97a. The questions presented are:

1. Whether, as the Fifth Circuit has held, a plaintiff in a CAA citizen suit may satisfy Article III’s traceability requirement merely by showing that she suffered the “kinds of injuries” that defendants’ conduct “could have” caused.

2. Whether this Court should overrule its holding, in Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167 (2000), that the availability of civil penalties paid to the government can satisfy Article III’s redressability requirement for private, citizen-suit plaintiffs.