Legal News

Stevens Cites Stevens in Brief to Stevens (and Other Justices)

By Peter Lattman

It’s unusual for a U.S. senator to write a brief for a Supreme Court case. It’s even more unusual for a senator to cite his own law-review article in that brief. But it all happened last week.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court urging the justices to uphold a $2.5 billion punitive damage award against Exxon Mobil over the 1989 Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

The lawsuit turns on the narrow field of federal maritime law, a subject Sen. Stevens knows well, as the brief’s second footnote suggests: “For an extended historical discussion of the relationship between maritime and common law, see generally Theodore F. Stevens, Erie R.R. v. Tompkins and the Uniform General Maritime Law, 64 HARV. L. REV. 246 (1950).”

This morning the Law Blog caught up with Stevens, who expressed some amusement over citing his own 58-year-old law review article in a Supreme Court brief. “I never expected to be in this situation,” said Stevens, a 1950 Harvard Law School graduate who practiced law for years before being elected to Congress in 1964. “I hesitated to put that in because I didn’t want to make it personal,” he said, “but it seemed to me that the concepts of the historical relationship of federal maritime law and state law were relevant to the issues related to the Exxon Valdez.”

Indeed they are. The award against Exxon Mobil is the largest ever by a U.S. federal court and is the final major litigation left from the Valdez oil spill. At issue in the case: whether the federal Clean Water Act precludes the federal maritime common law remedy of punitive damages. Stevens argued the fishermen should get the punitive damages.

Does he hope that the justices will go back and read his law-review article? “I don’t imagine the justices look at these amicus briefs that much,” he said. “A clerk might call one of the justices’ attention to the foontnote but this wasn’t an act of flamboyance at all — it’s just that I was writing a brief and wanted the justice to know that I was fully aware of the issues that will be before them.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).