Court Upholds Citizen Suits Over Pollution

The U.S. Supreme Court handed environmentalists a major victory Wednesday, upholding the right of citizens groups to sue alleged polluters under the federal Clean Water Act.

The decision is expected to have a major impact because activists frequently have used citizen suits as a means to enforce environmental laws--often winning court victories that go beyond the positions that government agencies have been willing to pursue.

The 7-2 ruling “is one of the biggest legal victories environmentalists have won in the past 20 years,” said David Beckman, staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles, which filed a friend-of-the court brief in the case.

Because the ruling would apply not only to the Clean Water Act but to more than 20 other environmental laws that have citizen suit provisions, it is expected to affect hundreds of cases nationwide--including many in the Western United States, Beckman said.

Business groups and conservative legal organizations had asked the court to throw out citizen suits altogether on the grounds that only government agencies, not private groups or individuals, should be allowed to enforce the law. As a fallback, they also argued that courts should be required to dismiss lawsuits if a company stopped whatever action was alleged to have harmed the environment.

Those arguments had prevailed in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Virginia and the Carolinas and is widely regarded as the most conservative of the federal appeals courts.

But the high court disagreed on both points.

“Congress has found that civil penalties in the Clean Water Act cases do more than promote immediate compliance . . . they also deter future violations,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the court.

“A would-be polluter may or may not be dissuaded by the existence of a remedy on the books, but a defendant once hit in its pocketbook will surely think twice before polluting again,” she wrote.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who dissented, objected that the ruling improperly permits “law enforcement to be placed in the hands of private individuals.”

“A Clean Water Act plaintiff pursuing civil penalties acts as a self-appointed mini-EPA,” Scalia wrote.

The Clean Water Act, along with several other environmental laws, includes a provision that a party that prevails or “substantially prevails” in a suit is entitled to have the polluter pay for its legal bills. Those provisions on legal fees have been a chief way that advocacy groups finance environmental lawsuits.

The history of the case helps illustrate why environmental groups believe citizen suits are important.

It began in 1992 when Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups notified Laidlaw Environmental Services, a South Carolina company that operated a hazardous waste incinerator, that they intended to file suit under the Clean Water Act.

The environmental groups alleged that Laidlaw had violated the law by discharging hazardous amounts of mercury and other pollutants into the North Tyger River.

Laidlaw, in what the company concedes was an attempt to block the citizen suit, invited the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control to sue the company. The agency agreed. Laidlaw’s lawyer drafted the complaint for the agency and paid the filing.

Just before the deadline for the environmental groups to sue, Laidlaw and the state agency reached a settlement requiring the company to pay $100,000 in civil penalties and to make “every effort” to comply with its Clean Water Act permits.

The environmentalists then sued. A federal district judge determined that violating its waste discharge permits had saved Laidlaw more than $1 million. He also concluded that Laidlaw had discharged more mercury into the river than allowed under its permit on 489 separate occasions and that the company had committed more than 400 monitoring violations and more than 500 reporting violations.

The judge fined Laidlaw $405,800--an amount that would be paid to the federal government. He also said the company would have to pay many of the environmental groups’ legal bills.

Contending that the fines were too small, the environmental groups appealed. The 4th Circuit then threw out the case, ruling that because Laidlaw had come into compliance with federal law, there was no longer any ground for the case to continue. The appeals court also ruled that the environmental groups should not have been allowed to sue in the first place because any monetary damages from the suit would go to government, not the individual plaintiffs.

The Constitution forbids federal lawsuits unless both parties have an actual stake in the outcome--a rule designed to prevent courts from being drawn into merely theoretical disputes.

But the Supreme Court majority rejected the notion that the environmentalists lacked a stake in how the case turned out. Although the environmental groups would not receive any of the money from a fine, their members still have a real interest, Ginsburg wrote, noting that individual plaintiffs testified that they had been unable to swim in the river because of the pollution.

The case now will return to the district court. The company’s lawyer, Donald A. Cockrill, said he was confident that the firm would be able to have the case dismissed on the grounds that there is no reason to expect further violations. The plant in question was closed while the case was on appeal.