Professor Dodge co-authors amicus brief in climate change appeal in Ninth Circuit

Professor William S. Dodge co-authored an amicus brief of conflict of laws and foreign-relations law scholars in Oakland v. BP PLC, which was filed with the Ninth Circuit on March 20.

Oakland and San Francisco brought a public nuisance suit against major oil companies relating to climate change. The district court dismissed based in part on the presumption against extraterritoriality and in part on a principle of “judicial caution” drawn from the Supreme Court’s Alien Tort Statute cases. The brief explains that the federal presumption against extraterritoriality does not apply to state law claims and that the Supreme Court’s ATS cases are inapplicable here. The brief is a revised version of a brief that Professor Dodge wrote with a clinic at Yale Law School in a similar case now on appeal to the Second Circuit.

Professor Dodge is Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law. He is a leading expert on international law and dispute resolution, who served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State from 2011 to 2012 and as co-reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law from 2012 to 2018. Professor Dodge is a co-author of the casebook Transnational Business Problems and a co-editor of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change, which won the American Society of International Law’s 2012 certificate of merit. He has authored more than 50 other publications in books and law reviews.