Chevron Scores Supreme Court Win in Louisiana Wetlands Case

Oil giant Chevron won a major Supreme Court victory on Friday that could end Louisiana‘s long-running effort to hold oil companies financially responsible for damage to its coast.

In an 8-0 Ruling, the justices said the company had shown a sufficient connection between the conduct challenged in Louisiana’s lawsuit and the company’s wartime work for the federal government, allowing the case to be heard in federal court rather than state court. Justice Samuel Alito did not take part in the ruling.

Chevron released a statement saying, “Chevron applauds the Supreme Court’s unanimous judgment recognizing that these 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. 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.”

The case, Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, centers on whether Chevron could invoke the federal officer removal statute, a law that lets federal officers and some contractors move cases from state to federal court.

Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said Chevron had plausibly alleged a “close relationship” between the crude-oil production challenged by Louisiana plaintiffs and its federal duties refining aviation gasoline for the U.S. military during World War II. The court said that the relationship was not “tenuous, remote, or peripheral,” and vacated the lower-court ruling that had kept the dispute in state court.

Federal court is widely seen as a more favorable venue for corporate defendants than the Louisiana state court, where Plaquemines Parish already secured a landmark $744.6 million verdict against Chevron in April 2025 over coastal land loss, contamination, and abandoned equipment linked to decades-old operations by Texaco, which Chevron later acquired. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed with the outcome but wrote separately. Still, the judgment was unanimous in result.

Louisiana’s coastal parishes filed 42 lawsuits in 2013, accusing oil and gas companies of violating state coastal management law by failing to obtain permits or restore sites properly. The Supreme Court’s ruling focused on cases brought by Plaquemines and Cameron parishes, but it is expected to influence a broader cluster of similar litigation against Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and other energy companies. The Associated Press reported that 11 of those 42 cases could be directly affected by the ruling.

Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority says the state has lost nearly 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s and could lose up to another 3,000 square miles over the next 50 years under a higher environmental scenario if conditions worsen. Those wetlands are not just ecological treasures. They are part of the region’s storm buffer, fishing economy, and energy infrastructure.

Louisiana and its coastal parishes have argued for years that canals, pits, drilling methods, and other oilfield practices accelerated erosion and wetland degradation. In the Supreme Court opinion, Thomas noted that the parish’s own expert report targeted wartime-era conduct, including Chevron’s use of canals, vertical drilling, and earthen pits. The court concluded that those actions were sufficiently tied to wartime production demands, including government pressure to conserve steel and maximize crude oil output for aviation fuel.