Exxon appeals Massachusetts climate case to Supreme Court

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Exxon Mobil Corp. is asking the Supreme Court to block Massachusetts’s attorney general from demanding certain information in an investigation over climate change.

The nation’s largest oil company says that state Attorney General Maura Healey’s (D) wide-ranging demand for documents violates the “due process” clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, since Exxon is headquartered outside of Massachusetts.

It’s an appeal of an April ruling by Massachusetts’s highest court, which said that the company had to comply with Healey’s civil investigative demand, akin to a subpoena.

“In the decision under review, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court compelled compliance with sweeping investigatory requests by the state’s attorney general for decades’ worth of documents concerning petitioner’s knowledge of, and the relationship of petitioner’s products to, climate change,” the company wrote to the nation’s highest court.

“It justified that exercise of judicial power based principally on advertisements, despite the attorney general’s admission that the ads at issue did not speak to the subject matter of the investigation and even though the corporation did not even create or approve the vast majority of the ads.”

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/405917-exxon-appeals-massachusetts-climate-case-to-supreme-court

[FBaggins]

1. Interesting. On what basis does MA claim jurrisdiction in the first place?

If Exxon is to be held somehow responsible for selling climate-impacting products knowing of their bad effects... I would expect that to be a federal case, not Massachusetts