Oil, Gas, and Mineral Law Commons^™

Oil & Gas And Corpus Linguistics, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

Oil and gas law focuses on the subsurface mineral estate, which is just what it sounds like: the estate that entitles one to the subsurface, to the stuff that is underground. That, of course, includes the minerals under a given piece of property, and the value associated with that is enormous. So, it is a big deal to have the right to minerals, and, if I convey to you "the mineral estate" of Blackacre or "the minerals under Blackacre" or something similar, then I have given you something very significant, indeed. As such, it is critical to know just what …

Infrastructural (Dis)Entitlement: Tactics Of Dispossession On The Critical Minerals Frontier, Dayna Nadine Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

In Ontario’s far north, settler state authorities and extractive firms are engaged in coordinated tactics to gain ground amid a polarization in the positions of Indigenous leadership. Alongside a surging resistance, we also witness a resigned acceptance of critical minerals mining by some First Nations. Drawing on years of community engaged research, I detail here the contemporary tactics of “infrastructural (dis)entitlement:” in this dynamic, infrastructural needs are both denied and fulfilled to differential effect. Infrastructural disentitlement is passive; it is not necessarily deliberate, nor is it politically or institutionally organized. But infrastructural entitlement is strategic and aggressive: Indigenous prosperity and …

Banning Plastic, Rachael E. Salcido

Utah Law Review

The disgusting nature of plastic pollution has finally captured the attention of policymakers and driven legal change. Local, state, and national bans on various plastic consumer items coupled with voluntary industry switching creates momentum toward a full-scale end to unnecessary plastic products. Bans have the capacity to create an important tipping point. This Article extolls the effectiveness of consumer bans and explores the challenges to achieving this highest level of environmental control. Plastic is essentially pure petroleum.1 Its persistence and destructiveness in the environment presents unique reasons to eliminate its use altogether. Plastics should only be used for essential products …

Environmental Law For A Just Transition, Dayna Nadine Scott

Articles & Book Chapters

The environmental justice movement, which turns our attention to fairness in the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens and in the processes, biases and
structures that determine those distributions, is challenging the foundations of environmental law.
• ‘Extractivism’ – a mode of accumulation that necessitates both a high pace and a large scale of taking of natural resources such as fossil fuels – is deeply embedded in environmental law, producing uneven costs/benefits and intense, concentrated impacts on people and ecosystems. Even as we move towards a greener economy, environmental laws and regulations governing such areas as facility siting, pollution permitting, …

We Shall Overcome: The Evolution Of Quotas In The Land Of The Free And The Home Of Samba, Stella Emery Santana

Seattle University Law Review

When were voices given to the voiceless? When will education be permitted to all? When will we need to protest no more? It’s the twenty-first century, and the fight for equity in higher education remains a challenge to peoples all over the world. While students in the United States must deal with the increase in loans, in Brazil, only around 20% of youth between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a higher education degree.

The primary objective of this Article is to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the development, implementation, and legal adjudication of educational quota systems within …

Pacific Islands And The U.S. Military: The Legal Borderlands Of The Environmental Movement, Sonia Lei

Seattle University Law Review

Climate change remains an urgent, ongoing global issue that requires critical examination of institutional polluters. This includes the world’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum: the United States military. The Department of Defense (DoD) is a massive institution with little oversight, a carbon footprint spanning the globe, a budget greater than the next ten largest nations combined, and overly generous exemptions to environmental regulations and carbon reduction targets. This Comment examines how this lack of accountability and oversight plays out in the context of three Pacific islands that have hosted U.S. military bases for decades. By considering the environmental impact of …

Private Climate Governance Of Finance: "Net Zero" Prospects And Politics., Cynthia A. Williams

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In 2021, as part of the COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (“GFANZ”) was announced. This Alliance of banks, asset managers, and insurance companies, among other financial institutions, with more than $130 trillion of assets under management when announced, was based on a pledge by the participating companies to work towards net-zero status in their businesses by 2050 or sooner. Led by former UK Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who is now the U.N.’s Special Envoy on Climate, it seemed to have some promise as a “soft law” governance mechanism to develop voluntary …

Three Essays On Energy Related To State Policies And Low Carbon Transitions, Pinky Thomas

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation consists of three essays on energy-related state policies and energy transition. Each paragraph below refers to the three abstracts for the three chapters in this dissertation, respectively.

The first essay is entitled: “Impacts of State Tax and Resource Ownership Policies on Extraction: Evidence from U.S. Natural Gas Production”. The innovation of combined use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies during the 2000s has allowed natural gas producers in the United States to extract natural gas and liquids from deep shale formations in a cost-efficient manner. This essay evaluates whether unconventional gas production responds to tax changes, and …

The Consumer’S Choice To Boycott, Agnes Bresee

Seattle University Law Review

In the wake of employees losing their jobs upon voicing their political opinions concerning Israel, Harvard and Columbia law students’ job offers being rescinded upon expressing support for Palestine, and the names and social media profiles of individuals who support Palestine being collected and listed on Canary Mission, such backlash may leave many Americans wondering what form of resistance to settler-colonialist apartheid is acceptable in the twenty-first century. Recently, the movement to collectively boycott brands like Starbucks, which sued its Worker’s Union for a tweet expressing support for Palestine; Disney, which donated money to Israel; and McDonald’s, where a location …

Squatters Squabbles: The Use Of Mediation To Provide Beneficial Solutions To Adverse Possession Claims In New Jersey, Bayla Zohn

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

In our society, law is a complex and ever-evolving field, constantly adapting to fit our needs. Yet, there are certain legal matters we would expect to have clear and obvious resolutions. Property ownership should be simple and unambiguous, governed by "established legal rules and precepts." Examine a deed, survey the stated legal owner of the tract of land, and your answer should be uncomplicated. Yet, there are a multitude of complex laws that allow individuals to obtain legal ownership of land in a seemingly illicit fashion.

A Different Approach To Agency Theory And Implications For Esg, Jonathan Bonham, Amoray Riggs-Cragun

Seattle University Law Review

In conventional agency theory, the agent is modeled as exerting unobservable “effort” that influences the distribution over outcomes the principal cares about. Recent papers instead allow the agent to choose the entire distribution, an assumption that better describes the extensive and flexible control that CEOs have over firm outcomes. Under this assumption, the optimal contract rewards the agent directly for outcomes the principal cares about, rather than for what those outcomes reveal about the agent’s effort. This article briefly summarizes this new agency model and discusses its implications for contracting on ESG activities.

Overseeing The Administrative State, Jill E. Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court has reduced the regulatory power of the Administrative State. Pending cases offer vehicles for the Court to go still further. Although the Court’s skepticism of administrative agencies may be rooted in Constitutional principles or political expediency, this Article explores another possible explanation—a shift in the nature of agencies and their regulatory role. As Pritchard and Thompson detail in their important book, A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court was initially skeptical of agency power, jeopardizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s ambitious New Deal plan. The Court’s acceptance …

The Sec, The Supreme Court, And The Administrative State, Paul G. Mahoney

Seattle University Law Review

Pritchard and Thompson have given those of us who study the SEC and the securities laws much food for thought. Their methodological focus is on the internal dynamics of the Court’s deliberations, on which they have done detailed and valuable work. The Court did not, however, operate in a vacuum. Intellectual trends in economics and law over the past century can also help us understand the SEC’s fortunes in the federal courts and make predictions about its future.

A Hard Pill To Swallow: The Abysmal Mental Health Standards Of Detained Immigrant Children In The United States, Rama Bankesly

Seattle University Law Review

After setting foot into the U.S., unaccompanied children must learn to navigate academic and legal systems while receiving little support and carrying the heavy burden of effects of trauma on their mental health. They need access to mental health care from qualified professionals, but as this Comment will explain, they systematically fail to receive care, as can be seen in cases like Doe v. Shenandoah Valley Juv. Ctr. Comm’n. In Shenandoah, an unaccompanied child arrived in the U.S. and was placed in a facility that failed to provide remotely adequate mental health care and in fact was subjected …

The Supreme Court And The Challenges For Fiscal Federalism: Mineral Area Development Authority V Steel Authority Of India, Sanyukta Chowdhury, Amit Chowdhury

National Law School Journal

This case comment analyses the 2024 Supreme Court judgement in Mineral Area Development Authority v Steel Authority of India, in which the court upheld the states’ power to tax mineral rights and mineral-bearing land. The authors discuss the issues involved, the approach of the bench towards interpretation, and the implications for the parties to the case and other stakeholders. They argue that while fiscal federalism is crucial to India’s constitutional scheme, the bench had limited leeway in deciding the case on this basis due to the absence of legal, doctrinal, and factual clarity.

Students For Fair Admissions: Affirming Affirmative Action And Shapeshifting Towards Cognitive Diversity?, Steven A. Ramirez

Seattle University Law Review

The Roberts Court holds a well-earned reputation for overturning Supreme Court precedent regardless of the long-standing nature of the case. The Roberts Court knows how to overrule precedent. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), the Court’s majority opinion never intimates that it overrules Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court’s leading opinion permitting race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Instead, the Roberts Court applied Grutter as authoritative to hold certain affirmative action programs entailing racial preferences violative of the Constitution. These programs did not provide an end point, nor did they require assessment, review, periodic expiration, or revision for greater …

The Potential For Conflicts Between Ccs Projects And Mineral Extraction, Joseph Schremmer

Faculty Articles

This article classifies the types of conflicts likely to occur between carbon dioxide sequestration and mineral extraction operations occurring simultaneously on the same tract of land. It then sets up framework for thinking through the legal disputes that may result. These are modest goals, and the central problem—concurrent carbon dioxide sequestration and mineral development—is more complex than can be fully analyzed here. I expect that much more work will need to be done on other important questions, hopefully building on this framework. Three further questions worthy of attention are (i) how these principles guide resolutions of specific kinds of disputes, …

Conflicts And Confluences Between Surface And Mineral Estates With Ccus, Joseph Schremmer

Faculty Articles

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) presents a new way of using an old resource: the subterranean rock structures and their interstitial “pore” space that make up the subsurface of the earth. Injecting carbon into these structures also raises a number of new legal questions about their ownership and the relations between the owners of the structures and the owners of other subsurface resources contained within them, like oil and gas, coal, coalbed methane, and geologically native carbon dioxide. This Article explores these new legal questions and the conceptual difficulties they present with the aim of guiding participants in CCUS …

Case Law On American Indians: October 2022 - August 2023, Thomas P. Schlosser

American Indian Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Sovereign Lands, Brent D. Chicken, Amanda J. Dick

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

Wyoming, John R. Chadd

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

West Virginia, Andrew S. Graham

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

Virginia, Zachary H. Barrett

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

Utah, Alan M. White

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

Texas, Melissa Munson, Matt Schlensker

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

Tennessee, Westley A. Ketron

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

Pennsylvania, Nathaniel I. Holland, Jon C. Beckman, Benedict J. Kirchner

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

Oklahoma, Matt Schlensker, Sandra Fraley

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

Ohio, Tim Mckeen, Melissa Grimes

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.

North Dakota, William J. Black

Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal

No abstract provided.