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Perry on Civil Liability & the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

By Lawrence Solum

Ronen Perry (University of Haifa - Faculty of Law) has posted The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the Limits of Civil Liability (Washington Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The article, which follows up on my recently published work, uses the unprecedented disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as an opportunity to critically evaluate the law pertaining to civil liability for oil pollution before and after the enactment of the Oil Pollution Act.

This topic is analyzed as a derivative of a more general concern, namely the internal harmony of civil liability regimes. The article unveils a general incongruity in American land-based and maritime tort law that surfaced through the Exxon Valdez litigation, and examines whether subsequent statutory reform has eliminated the problem in the limited context of marine oil pollution, using the Deepwater Horizon incident as a test case.

Part I systematically discusses pre-OPA law. Part II explains why pre-OPA maritime law gave rise to incongruity on the justificatory level, delineates the contours of the problem, and proposes a conceptual framework for resolution. Part III examines whether the enactment of the OPA has created a more defensible liability regime.

Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, there have been calls for raising the OPA liability caps, or an even more comprehensive legislative reform. While some of the initiatives seem to have waned, this catastrophic incident, like the earlier Exxon Valdez case, will surely leave its mark. The article, which highlights relevant policy concerns, will undoubtedly serve policymakers in reassessing the limits of civil liability for marine oil pollution.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on October 05, 2010 (boomark / email).