For context, a statement from the legal experts who monitored the trial.
> It is our collective assessment that the jury verdict against Greenpeace in North Dakota reflects a deeply flawed trial with multiple due process violations that denied Greenpeace the ability to present anything close to a full defense.
I can't speak to the institution but the only public statements on their website relate to this particular trial. It could be this is the first ever trial they have monitored in this way; it might also be a group that will only ever monitor this one trial.
I guess I was expecting a Matt Levine-style breakdown of why the trial was run improperly and why an appellate court would be expected to strike it down. Instead we have vague statements that could have come from an elected’s staff.
Yeah we're dealing with a mud fight between two highly resourced adversaries who are practiced in bullshit underhanded tactics and influence operations.
Nah, its one source of funding. The oil giants pump there money in bonkers oppossition- one Greta Thunberg glueing herself to a public street does more damage to that cause then the whole of counter propaganda ever could. And it prevents the debate about resonable measures like free public transport.
related topic -- "Judge shopping" refers to the practice of litigants strategically filing lawsuits in court districts or divisions where they are likely to be assigned to a judge sympathetic to their cause, often exploiting structural quirks in the judiciary
Most state courts randomly assign you a judge so it's not that simple, in some cases you can target certain districts in certain states where there are less judges (like the Texas patent judge). This is a trial in North Dakota because that's where the protests happened. I doubt they had many options in a single jurisdiction. The fallback for this stuff is of course a circuit court appeal.
Well, let's not get into this left-right thing because that could go back and forth forever. Especially in the current environment.
eg - "As an outsider, why is [the jury and judge] a credible institution over the monitors?"
We should all just give the legal experts time to look over the records of what happened, and assess why. From there, a consensus will likely emerge as to what happened during and before the trial. And the justice or injustice of the matter will present itself.
But you can't have a judge say one thing and some other single expert say another, and from those pieces of information decide anything of an authoritative nature. Our institutions just don't have that type of credibility any longer. This is the consequence of credibility crises for any society's steward classes.
It was a long slide getting here, decades actually. But I think we are firmly now at the point of the "credibility collapse" portion of the "credibility crisis".
Oil companies have been suppressing climate change research for decades to keep cooking the earth for profits. Is that not corruption? I suppose if you are economically exposed to these gains, don’t believe in climate change, and/or won’t be here for the bad times from this, the facts may not matter to your mental model. The facts remain that climate change is real and oil companies are doing their best to extract every bit of profit they can until we’re off of oil, regardless of the negative trajectories and outcomes from this.
Oil companies have a definite history of punching people and then suing them for running into their fist. But I should also point out that Greenpeace is the kind of shitty activist company that also does those kind of tactics, so an oil company suing Greenpeace leaves my priors as "I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario."
You know, it's possible for these oil companies to have done all this bad stuff, and for Greenpeace to be a pretty shitty organization. And for the person to have a different mindset than all the strawman assumptions you just made.
Oil companies have done worse than that, but we're not talking about them right now we're talking about Trial Monitors Dot Org, the real authoritative source on this trial that has done literally nothing else.
Oil companies haven't done a damn thing. We are the cause of global warming. Every time we pump gas into our car, buy anything that came from far away, or use any technology dependent on oil. Blaming oil companies is childish garbage people do to avoid recognizing their personal share of the responsibility.
You know the carbon footprint concept was literally created by BP marketing, to place the blame for climate change on society, and distract from all the evil stuff they did to promote more fossil fuel consumption and sabotage climate science.
The blame is 100% on society, so BP is correct to place it there. If we wanted to reduce our CO2 output to near zero we could do that easily. But it turns out that we would rather have all of our modern conveniences, so this is 100% our fault. Blaming it on oil companies is like a murderer blaming Smith and Wesson.
Blaming oil companies for the extremely well documented history of suppression of research and action into the impact of climate change is not childish.
You are literally avoiding the topic (Greenpeace intentionally created a misleading authoritative-looking entity) to say "Oil bad! Boo oil companies!".
The facts remain that Greenpeace did in fact attempt to slander (legal definition) the big oil corp.
Maybe you support "win at all costs" in this fight, but don't pretend one side is pure and honest.
Whereas, for decades, people made millions to tens of billions (esp Blackrock/ESG) on climate alarmism and their "solutions" to their claims of man-made, climate change. They and their supporters funded many of the studies supporting man-made climate change. I was not told this at all by liberal or academic sources promoting man-made, climate change with specific solutions.
They did tell me that we should oppose gas and "climate denial" because oil companies funded some studies backing their position. If they funded them, or if any author was ideologically biased, we're to dismiss everything in them as dogma or manipulation. Why don't climate alarmists apply the same rules, "follow the money" and "counter institutional bias," to their own beliefs and studies?
Could it be this is more dogmatism and economics than scientific and selfless consensus? If so, shouod we reject it by default until the stuff was all checked by provably-neutral sources with no incentives favoring eithet answer? (Spoiler: Yes!)
Why should I care what they think? Seriously, I'm so tired of seeing XYZ totally real and credentialed expert non government organization pop up in weird appeals to authority. They couldn't even be bothered to monitor any other trials for this one, this looks to be the only thing they've ever done.
> Greenpeace maintains it only had six employees visit the protest camps, and that all worked for Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace Fund or Greenpeace International.
> The jury found Greenpeace USA liable for almost all claims.
how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction: https://www.kcci.com/article/2-women-admit-to-causing-damage.... That’s legally straightforward conduct outside 1A protections.
The more tenuous thing here is proving Greenpeace incited people to do that. Without having seen the evidence, I’m guessing there were internal documents that were bad for Greenpeace. Activist organizations sometimes adopt pretty militant rhetoric in an effort to get protesters fired up. I bet these internal documents could seem sinister to a jury of ordinary people.
The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware. So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
> The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware.
I don't understand the distinction you're making here. Isn't there being a high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement literally a principle of modern first amendment law (Brandenburg etc)?
> So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
Even the way you write this makes it sound like you know it's problematic too.
> The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction
Decades and centuries from now our descendants will be dealing with the consequences of the destroyed climate and wonder why we punished the only people who tried to do something about it while justifying it by "the laws".
There are many other reasons that can kill you under the law besides anarchy, one of those is climate change and GP definitely has a very valid point.
Clearly the 'drill-baby-drill' crowd doesn't like Greenpeace at all and is doing what they can to muzzle activists because they know that if they manage to squelch Greenpeace then many lesser funded organizations will not be able to do anything all all. But history doesn't give a damn about any of that.
And in this case the jury found them on the hook to pay for the results.
I'm not sure what they were expecting. Direct action agains an oil pipeline in ND is gonna go over about as well as direct action tourism in Florida. If by some miracle you get a judge sympathetic to your cause you won't get a jury that is. The local people want this industry, generally speaking.
I loved the winters. I loved the people. I loved how its natural beauty was subtle and rewarded the patient, unlike El Capitan or the Black Hills. The economy was fine before oil appeared.
> A Morton County jury on Wednesday ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, finding that the environmental group incited illegal behavior by anti-pipeline protesters and defamed the company.
> The nine-person jury delivered a verdict in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer and Dakota Access LLC.
It seems like the jury did its job on the evidence presented.
You're gonna have a hell of a time construing a quality (energy sector or few steps removed employment) as "cause" when it's applicable to a large minority if not majority of the jury pool.
The judge might allow it, but the odds are long and the next judge will certainly allow an appeal on those grounds so you probably don't even gain much except time.
lol, nothing to do with Biden - Trump soiled his brand in NYC over 4+ decades of screwing people over, not paying bills around town, "strategic bankruptcies" etc.
It's telling that "trump" buildings rebranded in NYC...
My comment was flagged. But, basic assumption should not be that Trump voters and Biden ones are symmetrical.
One group finds candidate who defrauds more then any other politician before appealing and right kind manly. They see him sexually harassing women appealing. Moreover all fascists vote for Trump. Both sides have bad people in ... but Trump side is defined by them.
There is no symetry here. This particular choice is literally showing that yes, you are more likely to be unfair kind of juror.
North Dakota voted 67% overall for Trump, this is not too far from being representative of the general population. Considering that anyone who is openly hostile against energy companies is going to be removed during selection I don’t see the jury as the issue.
Edit: and considering this was the Southwest district, looking at results by county, 75% seems about right. This isn’t necessarily a biased jury in the sense that selection was unfair, this is probably the makeup you’d get with a fair selection. https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/north-dako...
People can hide their biases (or claim they can set them aside, which will often be acceptable during jury selection), and in a county with 30k people you're gonna run into people who recognize you at the grocery store a lot. This certainly wouldn't have been a pressure-free scenario.
It can be quite hard to get a jury to go against a locally powerful large employer in a small town.
That's not technically what a SLAPP is. The reason it is called a strategic lawsuit is frequently that it will cost the defendant so much to defend themselves that they opt to settle rather than risk that cost. Even if the plaintiff is unlikely to win, it is rarely a "no chance" situation, and with judge/district shopping, it is quite possible for large corporations to move further from "no chance" than an individual or non-profit might.
That is objectively not what happened here though, the point of SLAPP is that it's a frivolous suit that's meant to just exhaust the resources of the "dissenting voices". They won this suit and honestly it's not hard to believe that Greenpeace is guilty to some degree even if proving it is.
In theory, yes. But does that actually happen IRL? I've never heard of a lawyer getting disbarred for the quality of suits he or she is filing.
Many years ago in Northern CA we had a lawyer that was basically going around filing suits against everyone she came in contact with as a way to pay the bills. She was eventually declared a "vexatious litigant" and had to get a judge's permission before she could sue anyone in the future, but they didn't disbar her.
Well it is very hard to believe they're guilty, at least to me. Too bad the news report does not provide any actual information about the case and the evidence (actual journalism beyond clickbaity headlines).
In environmental circles, Greenpeace is very well-known to be traitors working with big corporations to launder their image. They're opposed to sabotage and revolutionary tactics. Their activities are mostly fundraising and legal proceedings, and on the rare instance they perform so-called civil disobedience (such as deploying banners on nuclear plants), it is in very orderly fashion that doesn't provide much economic harm.
As a left-wing environmentalist, i wish such a strong voice as Greenpeace was capable to incite people to rise against the greedy corporations destroying our planet. I just don't see that happening, neither here in France nor in the USA.
Contrasting specific technological and social artifacts with a form of economic organization and legal structures without noting how different they are is a cheap and weak form of argument.
If you want to insist that only greedy corporations could have made portable hand-held network connected computing devices possible, then make that point. If you want to insist that there could be no automobile or refueling system without a system in which corporate profits primarily are directed towards capital rather than labor, then make that point. If you find it impossible that powered flight would exist at a price where most people could afford it without specific laws controlling corporate liability and legal fiduciary responsibility, than make that point.
But "ah, so you use human-created technology while criticizing the organizations that make it" isn't really the winning argument that you appear to think it is.
> If you want to insist that only greedy corporations could have made portable hand-held network connected computing devices possible, then make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. Doesn't matter who makes it or if they are "greedy." Physics doesn't care about human emotions.
> If you want to insist that there could be no automobile or refueling system without a system in which corporate profits primarily are directed towards capital rather than labor, then make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. Physics doesn't care about accounting.
> If you find it impossible that powered flight would exist at a price where most people could afford it without specific laws controlling corporate liability and legal fiduciary responsibility, than make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. It doesn't matter what the price to the end user is or who liability. Physics does not care about lawyers.
> But "ah, so you use human-created technology while criticizing the organizations that make it" isn't really the winning argument that you appear to think it is.
If your criticism is about global warming, then yes it is a wining argument because the organizations are irrelevant. It burns oil and emits CO2. Physics doesn't care about human organizations.
The GP made an observation about "greedy corporations".
You sarcastically wrote
> Posted from your iphone while driving to the gas station to fill up? Where did you fly to for your last vacation?
as if using any of those technologies means that you have no standing to criticize "greedy corporations".
I've pointed out the (potential) disconnect between the technologies and the corporations, and you've now wandered off into "fossil fuels do stuff, physics matters" which of course is true but as before, has nothing to do with someone criticizing what they see as/claim are "greedy corporations".
Nice try, but I'm not stupid enough to fall for your deflection. GP did not complain about "greedy corporations." He complained about "greedy corporations destroying our planet." They aren't destroying our planet. You, GP, and I are destroying our planet. But unlike you and GP, I am an adult and I don't try to blame other people for my actions.
You're going to lose it when you discover that stacking entities and funneling wealth around happens as routinely as eating lunch, and it's the noble cause part that's the outlier here.
Countries usually require you to create a local corporation, non-profit, or similar, if you have any revenue or donations. The local entity is what will file the tax paperwork.
We need David Macaulay to add a book on corporate structures to his repertoire. Any organization operating at anywhere close to household-name scale is a collection of cooperating legal entities.
You know that 99% of companies with revenues above say $1B do exactly this, just in the guise of often less noble causes?
Fun fact, Monster Cables owns no patents or IP (or effectively none), it just licenses them all from the "wholly independent, arms-length" Monster Cables Bermuda, Inc. entity.
Or maybe, just maybe, they actually did unreasonably damage the pipeline company's reputation, in a way that is outside the legally-recognized bounds of free speech. Maybe justice actually was done.
(Note well: I haven't been following this case closely enough to say. But you should at least consider that as a possibility.)
Does your theory pass the sniff test? How reasonable is it to believe that Greenpeace's "defamation" cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars? Why is $345 the correct three-digit number of millions for the reputation damage Greenpeace caused?
this is only possible if you can somehow square a pipeline company's activities as intersecting with the arc of justice. as it stands, they're actively hastening the degradation of land, water, wildlife, human life and surrounding climates everywhere they operate.
Regardless of what you think of pipelines, under the current system they have the protection of the law. Courts are judging based on what the law says, not on the sense of "justice" that you seem to be operating on. As you yourself said, they may not intersect.
kind of an insulting position to assume i (or anyone else you might be educating) don't know that courts ostensibly rule on law/precedent.
i'm specifically responding to your use of the word "justice" and how those two do not always align - it's a lack of precise definition, or a disagreement in terms. this is one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon that exists, especially when you consider the lengths the fossil fuel industry has gone to hide and misdirect evidence of the negative environmental impacts of their business model.
They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.
> how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
Alternative possibility: they were actually guilty. Seems likely. The idea that Greenpeace was intentionally spreading misinformation doesn't require a big leap of faith.
There is absolutely no way the damage is that large and this seems to be mostly a revenge action by a community in which Greenpeace - or any other environmental organization - would never get a fair trial to begin with.
> They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.
I think that's not what the article is saying, although I read it that way too at first. Greenpeace USA, the organization whose six employees were on the ground, was found liable for "almost all claims"; it's only Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Fund, their sibling organizations, who were found not to be "responsible for the alleged on-the-ground harms committed by protesters".
No, their lawyers did a fairly decent job of demonstrating that Greenpeace wasn't coordinating the radical protestors that were showing up to the protests, anymore than MAGA was coordinating all of the violent shootings by right-wingers last year.
They were never going to win the trial. More than half of the jury pool had ties to the pipeline industry. They were always going to find against Greenpeace, and they went to fairly extreme lengths to ignore the evidence presented to come up with a ridiculous damage award far in excess of the company's actual damages (even accounting for a punitive damage markup).
Will they win on appeal? Maybe pre-Trump they had a chance, but right-wing judges no longer feel bound by the law, reason, or equity.
Some of the jurors had financial ties Energy Transfer, the district is heavily conservative and economically dependent on the oil industry. The deck was massively stacked against Greenpeace at trial.
Energy Transfer had previously attempted other suits which failed to get any traction because the claims are essentially Trump-style conspiracy theories about who is "pulling the strings" and "paying for" a massive decentralized protest movement.
But they got lucky on this one. One of the advantages of having so much money you can just burn it on questionable lawsuits until one succeeds.
North Dakota jury breaking things to please Daddy T. On a larger scale, jury trials for defamation are a ticking time bomb catastrophe, long term incompatible with free speech. Source: was on a defamation jury and it was an utter clown fiesta and pretty close to ended my remaining faith in the US legal system and the population as a whole.
Jury trials for defamation have been a thing since forever and haven't caused a catastrophe yet. Jury trials occasionally get things wrong as a matter of law, which is why we have an appeals process.
Sounds like it's time for GreenPeace USA to follow the chemical industries example - do a corporate reorg, put all the liabilities in specific subsidiary and then declare bankrupacy for that subsidiary.
I assume that is the point of having a Greenpeace USA -- to shield Greenpeace International and other Greenpeace organizations from liability. And it seems to have mostly worked.
Looking at the history ( back in the 1970s )- it appears to be in part the reverse - when Greenpeace USA was created, the original greenpeace, based in Vancouver, had a quarter of a million debt - and there was a bit of a fight over it.
Summarizing Matt Levine's various columns on the issue from memory:
1. J&J lost a lawsuit about talc and the winner was awarded $Xb (or maybe $XXXm, my memory is fuzzy) in damages.
2. J&J transferred $XXb to a new company.
3. It let the new company take on current and future liabilities for judgements on the talc issue.
4. J&J then had the new company declare bankruptcy. The bankruptcy process is designed to pay out money fairly to all creditors. The new company's only creditors were the plaintiffs in the lawsuit J&J lost + any future claimants. So this wasn't necessarily nefarious.
5. A judge rejected the bankruptcy because J&J had funded the company with $XXb and that was in excess of its current liabilities. As Levine put it, the company wasn't "bankrupt enough" yet.
I didn't keep up with the story after that so maybe I missed something.
Generally true, but one key point. Under bankruptcy law, you can give liabilities to a subsidiary, but you have to give the subsidiary enough money to pay the anticipated liabilities. That’s the reason why J&J gave the subsidiary so much money. Otherwise, the bankruptcy would have been dismissed as a fraudulent transfer. The bankruptcy court approved the bankruptcy filing, but on appeal the Third Circuit dismissed the bankruptcy because the subsidiary wasn’t bankrupt enough. Basically, in order to avoid fraudulent transfer law, J&J had to write the subsidiary a big check, but that money made the subsidiary ineligible for bankruptcy.
(Disclosure: I was on the team that won the appeal against J&J on this issue. My comment above is about the public record.)
> So the Texas Two-Step supports the idea that companies can’t just put liabilities in a subsidiary and put it into bankruptcy. The Texas Two-Step is an effort to work around that rule.
Sorry I'm having trouble parsing this because the first and second sentences seem to contradict each other. Or I'm just bad at reading.
> Disclosure: I was on the team that won the appeal against J&J on this issue
That's actually pretty cool. If I may ask, given that LTL was funded with many multiples of its liabilities, why was the bankruptcy appealed?
> Sorry I'm having trouble parsing this because the first and second sentences seem to contradict each other. Or I'm just bad at reading.
Sorry, I was unclear. You have a law that says that pre-bankruptcy transfers that were made to avoid liability can be voided: 11 USC 548: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/11/548. So say J&J put the liabilities into a subsidiary, but didn’t give it a check. The creditors would have been able to void the transfer of liability and give it back to J&J by proving that J&J transferred the liabilities that the subsidiary couldn’t pay.
To work around that, J&J did a particular formulation of the Texas Two-Step where it gave the subsidiary a big check to pay for the anticipated liabilities. The fact that J&J had to do that shows that the fraudulent transfer law does have some teeth. It was the reason J&J had to take the approach that ultimately got the subsidiary kicked out of bankruptcy court.
> If I may ask, given that LTL was funded with many multiples of its liabilities, why was the bankruptcy appealed
So the amicus brief from Public Justice—which I had no involvement with—does a good job of explaining the public interest concerns: https://www.tzlegal.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2022.07.0.... Bankruptcy court is a debtor-friendly forum and gives debtors tremendous leverage over creditors.
> The bankruptcy court didn’t agree that having too much money was a grounds for dismissing the bankruptcy filing. The appellate court reversed, finding that a company that had too much money was legally precluded from filing for bankruptcy.
I understood that. My question was why challenge the bankruptcy if there was apparently already enough money for everyone who won? Why not just go to bankruptcy court and pick up your check?
EDIT: Looks like this question was answered with an edit to the post I replied. Thanks!
1. funding commitments have been unenforceable in other Texas two step bankruptcies
2. allowing a bankruptcy court to figure out payments would turn all the thousands of plaintiffs' cases into a defacto class action (my understanding of what this person wrote).
I'm not sure what you mean. I think we are saying the same thing. The strategy to use Texas Two Step failed in 2025 and J&J gave up, and now they are going back to the regular way of resolving the litigation.
You said the Texas Two Step can't be used for fraudulent transfers (or at least, that's how I interpreted) and offered J&J's case as an example. My reply to that is J&J's Texas Two Step failed for a different reason, unrelated to fraudulent transfers.
My OP said that Texas Two step was used all the time. I said J&J tried to use Texas Two Step and it ultimately failed. And yes it did fail mostly because it was not being used in good faith.
> And yes it did fail mostly because it was not being used in good faith
As of today, judgments against J&J total to less than $10b. J&J committed up to $61.5b to LTL, the company it spun off. Simple arithmetic shows us all current judgments will be satisfied. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222778
The judge used this $61.5b commitment - which J&J made to ensure LTL would pay for all the lawsuits J&J lost - as proof that LTL wasn't actually bankrupt. Which is weird but also correct.
Where is the bad faith today? I mean it's possible J&J has done some internal analysis and expects to be on the hook for more than that in the future. Or there's some other arcane legal issue I don't understand. And in that sense committing the $61.5b is a smart way of capping their losses while still looking like good guys today. There's no evidence of that right now though.
To re-iterate, the bankruptcy was rejected because of how it was structured. Not because there was an attempt to dodge liability. To me that's a more damning indictment of the legal system because it implies liability dodging might have worked if it were structured right.
Nah, Matt Levine is an absolute Texas Two Step apologist, something that made me lose a lot of respect for him.
He repeatedly contorts himself into pretzels trying to defend it (why?) and into equal pretzels avoiding exploring the two elephants in the rule:
1. He (and those involved) claim that the process is "actually, truly, intended to be solely for the benefit of the plaintiffs suing us", and that defendants are doing them a favor, going out of their way to spin off these entities that are flimsy houses of cards.
2. Is it just a coincidence that of the firms who've gone through the Texas Two Step process, that they've managed to get away with not having to pay ninety per cent of court-ordered liabilities, and in at least one case, ninety-eight per cent?
Why on earth would these companies bend over backwards to do something that they claim has zero benefit for them, and is only truly intended to help streamline and optimize plaintiff's efforts in suing them?
Why is it even called the Texas Two Step? Is it because:
1. it assists claimants and plaintiffs (their adversaries) to bond together and present one solid unified case against you, or...
2. because it assists them to elegantly dance around their liabilities?
Levine and the firms and companies he's carrying water for insist the name has nothing to do with the second point.
In the JJ case, Levine's apologism of "they weren't bankrupt enough, yet" is horseshit.
JJCI was funded to the tune of $2B. Slightly less than the $61.5B of liability, you'll agree.
After the bankruptcy was rejected, the Judge had said that the bankruptcy might be necessary at some point in the future, but "now wasn't the time".
JJCI re-filed bankruptcy proceedings three hours later.
These don't add up anywhere close to $10b, let alone $61.5b.
$61.5b is the amount that J&J ultimately agreed to pay the new company (LTL) that it spun off to take over the liabilities.
This is from the court that rejected the bankruptcy:
"we cannot agree LTL was in financial distress when it filed its Chapter 11 petition. The value and quality of its assets, which include a roughly $61.5 billion payment right against J&J and New Consumer, make this holding untenable."
My translation: "This new company can get up to $61.5b from J&J but says it's in financial straits. Bankruptcy denied."
I'm aware the Texas Two Step is used by companies to get out of paying what they legally owe. It's unclear to me if this particular case is a good example of that today because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b and that's much more than the judgements against them.
If in 20 years all the judgements end up being more like $80b and J&J says "Whoopsie, money's run out" then I guess we can call shenanigans.
I don't know what Matt Levine has said about the Texas Two Step outside of this case.
> JJCI re-filed bankruptcy proceedings three hours later
What did they change in their application? What happened to the new filing?
> I'm aware the Texas Two Step is used by companies to get out of paying what they legally owe. It's unclear to me if this particular case is a good example of that today ...
They are using the same law firm (Jones Day) as the others. It's a perfectly good example.
> ... because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b and that's much more than the judgements against them.
Actually, the $2B and $8.9B proposals in LTL's two bankruptcy proceedings made the funding from J&J contingent on claimants and future claimants accepting the bankruptcy, i.e. its J&J effectively trying to shoehorn this into an informal class action - plaintiffs can choose to form a class action, defendants are not able to force them into one, but this effectively would. So it seems unlikely that J&J would ever be on the hook for $61.5B. Indeed, HoldCo, the parent of LTL, in turn owned by J&J would only ever be funded to a maximum of $30B.
> Here's a law firm's summary of all the judgments to date against J&J
to date. There's many many more (thirty-eight thousand) cases that have not been adjudicated, in fact.
> because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b
Where do you think that number came from? J&J playing good corporate samaritan, or knowing that they still have many, many more cases winding through the courts, or in discovery, than have had final judgments rendered so far?
Good for J&J. They've actually only paid $2B - of the $10B of judgments that you yourself acknowledge. Good for J&J. And they've committed to funding $61.5B? How's that worked out for other companies doing this?
Georgia Pacific, in the same spot, committed to an initial funding of their T2S entity, and to review this further as needed. In the end, they funded it to the tune of $175M. And then told the court that the entity was entirely independent from GP and they had no obligation to do any such thing.
St Gobain, in the same spot, committed to funding to the tune of $50B, and ended up putting in less than $100M and refusing anything further.
So audacious was St Gobain that they were laid into by the court:
> Gross testified that Saint-Gobain repeatedly misrepresented its intent in creating the subsidiary that eventually filed for bankruptcy, calling executives’ testimony and other statements “misleading” and “not truthful.” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Craig Whitley followed Gross’s testimony last August with factual findings that included his own blistering critique of the executives’ statements as “contrary to the evidence,” saying the company’s story “strains credibility.”
Four major companies have tried the Texas Two Step lately. All of them have used the same one law firm, again, Jones Day. Three of them (J&J being the fourth) have managed to drastically under-deliver on their commitments and liabilities and have emerged unscathed as a result.
Trane Technologies, same thing.
Weird that LTL was formed in North Carolina, where this scheme seems to work, yet J&J has no corporate presence there (headquartered in NJ)
But somehow, J&J, and Matt Levine would love us to believe that this time, somehow, it'll be different.
> What did they change in their application?
They changed the number from $2B to $8B and filed bankruptcy again. It was again dismissed. The first time, the courts as you said described it as an untenable position. Now, they were more annoyed, saying that the application was made in actively bad faith.
"Johnson & Johnson would later make a third attempt at resolving talc litigation through bankruptcy in 2024, which also failed. The company continued to face thousands of lawsuits alleging its talc products were contaminated with asbestos and caused cancer.
The repeated bankruptcy dismissals established important precedent limiting the ability of financially healthy corporations to use the Texas Two-Step strategy to avoid mass tort litigation."
This is from another mesothelioma law firm (important to note that J&J has actually resolved many of the mesothelioma claims against it, ~95%. But the vast majority of claims are around asbestos, and have a much clearer causality, typically resulting in larger verdicts).
April 2025, J&J, sorry, LTL, have since tried, and failed, to file a fourth bankruptcy. They're getting increasingly nervous that they won't be able to sidestep liability.
There's also this hugely perverse incentive with all of these "commitment to fund"s:
"You injured me and have been ordered to compensate me. But in order to do so I have to hope you continue to prosper, potentially injuring others along the way, so I get my compensation. I can choose between getting you shut down, but potentially not being compensated, or being compensated but knowing that you go on to be able to do this to others."
Your post boils down to "funding commitments are worthless and unenforceable", which if true is
1. surprising to me, a layman. and
2. means it's just as well J&J's ploy didn't work.
All the rest about J&J using the same law firm etc. doesn't make for much of a smoking gun for me.
You're also right about the perverse incentives. But it would be equally unfair if the last 37k of those 38k plaintiffs didn't get any money because the first 1000 to win were awarded all of it.
Tl;dr J&J may or may not be playing fair. Is there another orderly process to ensure all plaintiffs are treated fairly?
Yup. It's "weird" that all of these companies claim that "swear to god, we fully intend to honor our obligations", then all of them use this one law firm who specializes in doing exactly the opposite and "oops, look what happened, we have no more legal obligation, that belongs now to this other entity that we said we'd fund but ... somehow ... didn't. Or certainly not anywhere near where we said we would."
But there are definitely apologists and deniers of it, even right here on HN. Or "you don't know that's what's going to happen, we owe it to them to wait and see", even as you watch the exact same law firm guide another company through the exact same process in the exact same way, but somehow, maybe, this time, it'll have a different outcome.
It’s only illegal if they don’t get away with it. Most get away with it in corporate America. If bad actors are going to push the bounds of the legal framework, good actors should as well when the rules don’t matter. Rule of “Fuck you make me.” To improve odds of success, one could operate from a position of being judgement proof, organizing corporate and legal entities accordingly from a charging perspective. Laws are not objective, it’s all interpretative dance. Know how to dance for the performance you choose to participate in.
The proper way to do it would be to let Greenpeace USA go insolvent and then immediately form GreenPeace America as a new entity unhindered by the liabilities of the old one.
This tactic has been used by our current President.
Saving this thread in case anyone ever tries to claim this forum is full of intelligent discussion.
Life pro tip: A 345 million dollar judgment against a company worth less than 10% of that for the crime of maybe telling some protesters to engage in direct action against a company leaking oil into their water supply is not remotely sane, no matter how 'legal' the jury of oil-connected people may say it was.
> maybe telling some protesters to engage in direct action against a company leaking oil into their water supply
Sounds like you put the maybe in the wrong place. The jury found that they did do that. And you have no evidence whatsoever that they leaked any oil into the water supply.
Does anyone know what assets Greenpeace USA has? I imagine Greenpeace international will set up Greenpeace USA 2.0, all the volunteers/employees will move over, and the original will just go bankrupt.
If you are going to break the law under capitalism, you must do it sustainably. Facebook, Apple, et al have shown that the latency of judicial pipeline usually means a billion dollar in fines comes after several billion in profits. You profit from the lag between the crime and the consequence.
I don't think social justice has that same profit pipeline, but I am not sure. There is an asymmetry in the type of evil our society allows.
Break the law, make $1B of illegal money, then get dragged to court and pay a $200M fine - while you keep most of the profit and your market position you illegally gained.
Bonus: Shield all managers from personal accountability, best in a way that they got their bonus and salary and moved on a long time ago before the verdict hits.
Best: Not get to court, but make an $100M outside court settlement.
They just need to do what oil & gas (and other "dirty" industries) do to avoid reputcussions: form lots of shell companies to shield the parent. It becomes a hydra of corporations kinda like terrorist cells.
It would be very easy for an energy company to make hundreds of thousands of donations through "private supporters" to Greenpeace so as to cause problems for their competitors without liability, including defamation, and violent protests. They could be profiting by encouraging angry kids to go ruin their lives, and there would be no consequences for the executives behind it all. In fact, if this were actually happening, then in this story they would have just gotten back half of their marketing budget, which they can recycle for another violent campaign against this or any other competing energy company. And college kids around the world would help to supplement that marketing budget by donating to what they think is an environmental cause.
The Harvard educated doctor, magna cum laude, with a long history of fighting for a better America for all Americans.
The Jewish lady who was smeared as a Russian agent because she was at a diplomatic dinner that Putin also attended.
The woman who challenged election results in 2016, only for the response to be to make it harder to question election results (and that certainly never blew-back on all of us).
The lady who was then put under Senate investigation for two years over the so-called collusion with Russia which turned up precisely zero evidence.
Who put up the single best fight against two entrenched pro-genocide parties of anyone else in America's 350 million people.
The 2024 candidate with the highest vote to campaign funds ratio of any candidate by a factor of about ten despite having a tiny fraction of the election coverage.
What exactly are you saying the comparison is here? That Americans tend to cheer for the villains and boo the heroes just because the media tells them to?
This is funny. I didn't know who Jill Stein is, so I asked an LLM about how she is relevant. Instead of explaining how she might be involved in evil conspiracies, it thinks that Jill Stein is relevant because, "like a charged college kid," she was apparently at this Greenpeace protest! Hilarious.
Mossad is trafficking children to billionaires for blackmail material, and it's just led directly to a war on Iran because the president of the US is in CSAM.
No conspiracy is too cynical. If you can think of it, they can think of it.
I think climate change is a massive and real problem. And that we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels quickly. But I would actually be very happy to see Greenpeace fold as a result of this. I think they’ve been on the wrong side of many important issues, including this one.
I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels. And thus does relatively little to change our path to sustainable energy. But it does a lot geopolitically. Having more local oil means the trigger-happy US government is less likely to start wars to ensure access to oil. Heck even the Iran conflict this week stems back to the 1953 CIA-instituted coup which was half motivated by protecting access to oil.
Hot take: decarbonization is a policy issue that should be pursued primarily through incentives to increase production and quality of clean alternatives. Not by throttling supply of oil. Look at the electrical grid. Solar and wind are just cheaper than fossil fuels now which means the decarbonization is economically inevitable.
I have some inside knowledge here. When I was in college, I was very idealistic. I was in a special Greenpeace program where they took college students and trained them to become environmental activists. Picture a semester-long, hands-on training course.
You actually fully go out into the field to run campaigns and meet everyone from the President of Greenpeace to the front-end activist hanging banners and whatnot.
I actually liked the President and DC lobbyist folks more than the weridos out and about dropping banners and doing the extreme stuff.
I walked away being kind of turned off from the Organization and realized a lot of these folks were not pragmatic and more dogmatic than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful and had a blast, but I dropped out of college and became a software engineer instead of an activist.
This case is not important because of Greenpeace, it's important because of the implications for free speech in the US. They are not being bankrupted because they took the wrong stance on nuclear, they're being bankrupted for supposed defamation and incitement against a major energy corporation.
This is a precedent that will be used to attack all kinds of civil society organizations when they threaten the profits of major corporate interests. Including the civil society organizations which you do agree with.
I think our society would be better off if everybody did less incitement in their political dialogue. It's become all too common for political discourse to become unhinged. So in that sense, I think this precedent is also fine.
I think this is how it goes: The people who set things on fire weren't directly associated with Greenpeace. But the argument is that Greenpeace's rhetoric incited them to do so. So it becomes a freedom of speech issue. If you tell people something is evil and must be burned, are you responsible for that thing getting torched?
> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power
I think the nuclear industry didn't do itself any favors. And the oil companies didn't want it to succeed either and did its best to hobble it. The environmental groups are a convenient patsy to take the blame for the outcome. If Greenpeace is so powerful why hasn't it been able to end whaling or the oil industry?
I agree. In the long term we need to reduce fossil fuel usage but in the short term, restricting pipeline construction means that more petroleum products are transported by rail cars which is a lot dirtier and more dangerous. We have to take a pragmatic harm minimization approach rather than being idealistic.
> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
I don't have much time for Greenpeace. Much of their activism has never been science based, and usually involves criminal acts against property. History will not be kind to them.
Their only highlight is 'saving' the whales. For a while.
Yes I will think of the property because private property rights are critical and I 100% support private property owners using violence to defend their property from vandals and thieves.
Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels.
This is ignoring the issue of tribal sovereignty and water rights which is where most of the issue lies imo. No one is trying to ruin the economy, they simply want untainted natural resources on their own property.
If this pipeline was going through disneyland, i don't think you'd hear popular arguments about disney trying to ruin the oil economy.
I think that’s half right. We are absolutely horrendous to natives around here. But that’s not why Greenpeace got involved, nor why most of the left cares about this issue.
If the pipeline was going through Disneyland I think you’d still see the same people up in arms protesting. They’d just be searching for a different justification.
This is a complete load of shit. Oil is trucked back and forth over those roads all day and night, and that has a much higher leakage rate than a pipeline. NIMBYs never come out and say they just don't want something built. They always have some bullshit excuse like this.
I mean what you just said is the huge load of shit. There are interesting differences in risk and pollution between trucking and piping, but they’re not nearly as black and white as you claim and they don’t require acrimony. Calm the hell down?
But restricting supply raises prices and naturally encourages sustainable energy. That kind of change is self reinforcing. Government incentives disappear at the change of every administration.
No, restricting supply when it exists just turns people paying the higher prices against you. When the supply restrictions are in fundamentals it can work for you. When supply restrictions are on something few people care about it can work for you. However the majority of people (particularly in ND) drive and feel the cost of gas - often they feel these costs even more than they really affect the budget because they are visible every time you buy it in ways the things that have a larger effect on their budget are not.
If you want to encourage sustainable energy you need to make that your focus. Make it cheaper. Ignore oil and fight laws that make it harder to build sustainable energy. ND has great wind potential (they get 40% of their electric from wind already), but it could be better (they have a small population - which means they can export wind energy to Minnesota or if we build transmission lines even farther).
When you focus on raising oil prices you ensure that your side gets voted out in the next election and your gains are undone. When you focus on building renewable energy you get something that can stay. (Just don't build only on the white house as that can be quickly removed - build everywhere so removal is expensive)
Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set across all supply sources. Restricting its movement from Canada to the US doesn’t actually change the price much at all. It just makes the supply more vulnerable to disruption. That dirty shale oil only comes out of the ground when prices are really high. Otherwise it’s not worth it. If prices are high it will come out of the ground and get burned. The only question is where and who has access to it.
It's already too late. We passed the point of no return. There was a blip where every outlet was saying that the point of no return was like 6 months away than nothing.. We shot right past it.
Strange take. What does that mean? Give up because we can’t do anything - “it’s already too late”? So burn all the oil because YOLO?
Or maybe those people drawing hard lines in the sand were exaggerating to drive urgency and get attention? Sometimes people whose stated goals you agree with say and do things which are wrong.
Also I never mentioned just give up. I just said it’s already too late. That’s reality. What you do next is your choice. But don’t put words in my mouth.
It's never too late, that's not what "the science" says it's what the clickbait vulture news bullshit you're reading is saying. The real science on the matter is that every day things get just a little bit worse, and every improvement makes things just a little bit better. There's no magic cliff, no point of no return, just one day after another.
There are tipping points, when warming accelerates and becomes irreversible.
There’s some debate in “the science” about how quickly we’ll reach that point. Limiting warming to +2°C was not a scientific position; it was political, based on what people thought was achievable. Before the Paris Agreement, 2° was not considered “safe”.
Anyway, it turns out we’re going to zoom past 2° in the next couple of decades.
Steven is a lawyer who helped Ecuador sue Chevron who was polluting massively. The Ecuadorians won and secured an historic $9.5 billion judgment because it was so egregious. Did that end the matter? No.
Chevron ran to American courts and argued that Donziger helped secure this judgment by committing fraud. I believe the evidence of this was a video showing a minister and Donziger at a social gathering. The court ruled in Chevron's favor. This made the judgment unenforceable in the US.
As part of all this, Chevron wanted Donziger to hand over all communications and electronic devices associated with the Ecuador prosecution. That is of course attorney-client privilege. But the court agreed and Donziger refused.
But it didn't end there. Chevron (through their law firm) lobbied the Department of Justice to criminally prosecure Donziger for this. The DoJ declined.
But it didn't end there either. Chevron asked the court, and they agreed, to appoint Chevron's own law firm to conduct a private criminal prosecution. You might be asking "what is that?" and you'd be right to be confused. It rarely happens but a civil court can pursue a private criminal prosecution.
Donziger was convicted, disbarred and spent years in home detention over this whole thing. The Appeals Court affirmed all this and the Supreme Court declined to intervene.
So does it surprise me that Greenpeac can get hit by a $345M judgment for hurting the feelings of an oil company? No, no it does not.
> Chevron ran to American courts and argued that Donziger helped secure this judgment by committing fraud. I believe the evidence of this was a video showing a minister and Donziger at a social gathering. The court ruled in Chevron's favor. This made the judgment unenforceable in the US.
If you're interested in this story, I would encourage you to read the full contents of the ruling in this US case. (https://theamazonpost.com/wp-content/uploads/Chevron-Ecuador...) It's long but relatively easy reading, and it contains a lot more evidence against Donziger's side of the story than a video of a social gathering. In particular, it seems absolutely unambiguous to me that his team blackmailed one of the Ecuadorian judges into giving him favorable rulings, implementing the theory repeatedly found in his personal notebooks that "the only way the court will respect us is if they fear us".
I'll call you a pdf, put banners on every utility pole where you live, and even set your bicycle on fire. Will it count as I just "hurt your feelings"?
For context, a statement from the legal experts who monitored the trial.
> It is our collective assessment that the jury verdict against Greenpeace in North Dakota reflects a deeply flawed trial with multiple due process violations that denied Greenpeace the ability to present anything close to a full defense.
https://www.trialmonitors.org/statement-of-independent-trial...
As an outsider, why is this a credible institution over the jury and judge?
I can't speak to the institution but the only public statements on their website relate to this particular trial. It could be this is the first ever trial they have monitored in this way; it might also be a group that will only ever monitor this one trial.
I guess I was expecting a Matt Levine-style breakdown of why the trial was run improperly and why an appellate court would be expected to strike it down. Instead we have vague statements that could have come from an elected’s staff.
In other words Greenpeace is trying to muddy the waters and hide their guilt by painting themselves as the victims of injustice?
How very original..
Yeah we're dealing with a mud fight between two highly resourced adversaries who are practiced in bullshit underhanded tactics and influence operations.
Nah, its one source of funding. The oil giants pump there money in bonkers oppossition- one Greta Thunberg glueing herself to a public street does more damage to that cause then the whole of counter propaganda ever could. And it prevents the debate about resonable measures like free public transport.
Based on their "Meet the Committee" page, they look a bit more like they have a dog in this fight beyond simply adjudicating the case.
https://www.trialmonitors.org/meet-the-committee
Plenty of accomplished people there, but as a group "unbiased observers" isn't the first phrase that comes to mind.
related topic -- "Judge shopping" refers to the practice of litigants strategically filing lawsuits in court districts or divisions where they are likely to be assigned to a judge sympathetic to their cause, often exploiting structural quirks in the judiciary
Most state courts randomly assign you a judge so it's not that simple, in some cases you can target certain districts in certain states where there are less judges (like the Texas patent judge). This is a trial in North Dakota because that's where the protests happened. I doubt they had many options in a single jurisdiction. The fallback for this stuff is of course a circuit court appeal.
Care to explain how a circuit court might come to hear an appeal out of a state court of general jurisdiction?
In America, just about anything is more cridble than our "justice" system.
Well, let's not get into this left-right thing because that could go back and forth forever. Especially in the current environment.
eg - "As an outsider, why is [the jury and judge] a credible institution over the monitors?"
We should all just give the legal experts time to look over the records of what happened, and assess why. From there, a consensus will likely emerge as to what happened during and before the trial. And the justice or injustice of the matter will present itself.
But you can't have a judge say one thing and some other single expert say another, and from those pieces of information decide anything of an authoritative nature. Our institutions just don't have that type of credibility any longer. This is the consequence of credibility crises for any society's steward classes.
It was a long slide getting here, decades actually. But I think we are firmly now at the point of the "credibility collapse" portion of the "credibility crisis".
Because sometimes corruption happens.
They're a bunch of lifetime activists who spun up an authoritative sounding NGO that has done literally nothing else, but yeah muh corruption.
Oil companies have been suppressing climate change research for decades to keep cooking the earth for profits. Is that not corruption? I suppose if you are economically exposed to these gains, don’t believe in climate change, and/or won’t be here for the bad times from this, the facts may not matter to your mental model. The facts remain that climate change is real and oil companies are doing their best to extract every bit of profit they can until we’re off of oil, regardless of the negative trajectories and outcomes from this.
https://www.ucs.org/resources/decades-deceit
Oil companies have a definite history of punching people and then suing them for running into their fist. But I should also point out that Greenpeace is the kind of shitty activist company that also does those kind of tactics, so an oil company suing Greenpeace leaves my priors as "I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario."
> I don't know which side is more likely right in this scenario.
What are the motives? Follow the money? Who profits most might give an indication of who is more likely wrong.
You know, it's possible for these oil companies to have done all this bad stuff, and for Greenpeace to be a pretty shitty organization. And for the person to have a different mindset than all the strawman assumptions you just made.
Oil companies have done worse than that, but we're not talking about them right now we're talking about Trial Monitors Dot Org, the real authoritative source on this trial that has done literally nothing else.
Oil companies haven't done a damn thing. We are the cause of global warming. Every time we pump gas into our car, buy anything that came from far away, or use any technology dependent on oil. Blaming oil companies is childish garbage people do to avoid recognizing their personal share of the responsibility.
You know the carbon footprint concept was literally created by BP marketing, to place the blame for climate change on society, and distract from all the evil stuff they did to promote more fossil fuel consumption and sabotage climate science.
The Climate Town channel on Youtube has lots of video's on this, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J9LOqiXdpE
The blame is 100% on society, so BP is correct to place it there. If we wanted to reduce our CO2 output to near zero we could do that easily. But it turns out that we would rather have all of our modern conveniences, so this is 100% our fault. Blaming it on oil companies is like a murderer blaming Smith and Wesson.
Blaming oil companies for the extremely well documented history of suppression of research and action into the impact of climate change is not childish.
It is childish to think that anything would have been different if this research was released.
You are literally avoiding the topic (Greenpeace intentionally created a misleading authoritative-looking entity) to say "Oil bad! Boo oil companies!".
The facts remain that Greenpeace did in fact attempt to slander (legal definition) the big oil corp.
Maybe you support "win at all costs" in this fight, but don't pretend one side is pure and honest.
Whereas, for decades, people made millions to tens of billions (esp Blackrock/ESG) on climate alarmism and their "solutions" to their claims of man-made, climate change. They and their supporters funded many of the studies supporting man-made climate change. I was not told this at all by liberal or academic sources promoting man-made, climate change with specific solutions.
https://youtu.be/DOWTDDy6wlg?si=hZsk4likxTi9nC-E
They did tell me that we should oppose gas and "climate denial" because oil companies funded some studies backing their position. If they funded them, or if any author was ideologically biased, we're to dismiss everything in them as dogma or manipulation. Why don't climate alarmists apply the same rules, "follow the money" and "counter institutional bias," to their own beliefs and studies?
Could it be this is more dogmatism and economics than scientific and selfless consensus? If so, shouod we reject it by default until the stuff was all checked by provably-neutral sources with no incentives favoring eithet answer? (Spoiler: Yes!)
Why should I care what they think? Seriously, I'm so tired of seeing XYZ totally real and credentialed expert non government organization pop up in weird appeals to authority. They couldn't even be bothered to monitor any other trials for this one, this looks to be the only thing they've ever done.
My non-profit Analyzing the HN Posts (just created today) has verified that this is 100% real.
And a statement from legal experts monitoring this group https://pastebin.com/EEsEXbcz
Apparently, according to this source, trial monitors.org is a fake organization. There is some evidence that this is a credible accusation.
Greenpeace should just do a Texas Two Step. Works for heavy industry.
> Greenpeace maintains it only had six employees visit the protest camps, and that all worked for Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace Fund or Greenpeace International.
> The jury found Greenpeace USA liable for almost all claims.
how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction: https://www.kcci.com/article/2-women-admit-to-causing-damage.... That’s legally straightforward conduct outside 1A protections.
The more tenuous thing here is proving Greenpeace incited people to do that. Without having seen the evidence, I’m guessing there were internal documents that were bad for Greenpeace. Activist organizations sometimes adopt pretty militant rhetoric in an effort to get protesters fired up. I bet these internal documents could seem sinister to a jury of ordinary people.
The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware. So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
> The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware.
I don't understand the distinction you're making here. Isn't there being a high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement literally a principle of modern first amendment law (Brandenburg etc)?
> So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.
Even the way you write this makes it sound like you know it's problematic too.
It's not protected speech to direct illegal action from afar, so it doesn't matter one whit if Greenpeace was there six times or six thousand or zero.
> The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction
Decades and centuries from now our descendants will be dealing with the consequences of the destroyed climate and wonder why we punished the only people who tried to do something about it while justifying it by "the laws".
> "the laws"
We live under law or we die under anarchy.
There are many other reasons that can kill you under the law besides anarchy, one of those is climate change and GP definitely has a very valid point.
Clearly the 'drill-baby-drill' crowd doesn't like Greenpeace at all and is doing what they can to muzzle activists because they know that if they manage to squelch Greenpeace then many lesser funded organizations will not be able to do anything all all. But history doesn't give a damn about any of that.
You can die under law, too.
Little known fact is that you can die over law too.
Direct action is literally their policy
And in this case the jury found them on the hook to pay for the results.
I'm not sure what they were expecting. Direct action agains an oil pipeline in ND is gonna go over about as well as direct action tourism in Florida. If by some miracle you get a judge sympathetic to your cause you won't get a jury that is. The local people want this industry, generally speaking.
That’s very true.
The frozen plains of North Dakota aren’t worth much without oil. With oil, they provide good paying jobs to people who otherwise won’t have them.
I lived in the next state south for many years. Oil is definitely popular with the people of North Dakota.
With all due respect, I disagree.
I loved the winters. I loved the people. I loved how its natural beauty was subtle and rewarded the patient, unlike El Capitan or the Black Hills. The economy was fine before oil appeared.
https://www.dmr.nd.gov/dmr/news/studies-underscore-oil-and-g...
The claims were for defamation and incitement:
> A Morton County jury on Wednesday ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, finding that the environmental group incited illegal behavior by anti-pipeline protesters and defamed the company.
> The nine-person jury delivered a verdict in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer and Dakota Access LLC.
It seems like the jury did its job on the evidence presented.
Rough jury pool. 75.36% for Trump in the latest election, and one presumes a lot of energy sector employment.
Maybe? The judge, and the lawyers involved have the right to reject jurors that might prejudice a trail.
Yes, but that's a lot easier to manage in a county that doesn't have only 30k people in it.
They applied for change of venue 3 times, lost all 3 times, and appealed it to the north dakota supreme court, and lost there too.
Overall, they could not make the showing necessary.
I read the motions and responses, and was not particularly impressed with their arguments for change of venue.
Lawyers don't have unlimited removals though.
Not peremptory strikes, but you have unlimited removals for cause (and admittedly a steep appellate hill to climb if they’re unfairly denied)
You're gonna have a hell of a time construing a quality (energy sector or few steps removed employment) as "cause" when it's applicable to a large minority if not majority of the jury pool.
The judge might allow it, but the odds are long and the next judge will certainly allow an appeal on those grounds so you probably don't even gain much except time.
Did you feel that the jury in New York City (76% voted for Biden in 2020) that convicted Trump of falsifying business records similarly corrupt?
NYC has a… slightly larger population to pull from, which makes the chances of being recognized at the store quite a bit lower.
Convicting Trump doesn't throw half of NYC onto the dole, either.
lol, nothing to do with Biden - Trump soiled his brand in NYC over 4+ decades of screwing people over, not paying bills around town, "strategic bankruptcies" etc.
It's telling that "trump" buildings rebranded in NYC...
My comment was flagged. But, basic assumption should not be that Trump voters and Biden ones are symmetrical.
One group finds candidate who defrauds more then any other politician before appealing and right kind manly. They see him sexually harassing women appealing. Moreover all fascists vote for Trump. Both sides have bad people in ... but Trump side is defined by them.
There is no symetry here. This particular choice is literally showing that yes, you are more likely to be unfair kind of juror.
North Dakota voted 67% overall for Trump, this is not too far from being representative of the general population. Considering that anyone who is openly hostile against energy companies is going to be removed during selection I don’t see the jury as the issue.
Edit: and considering this was the Southwest district, looking at results by county, 75% seems about right. This isn’t necessarily a biased jury in the sense that selection was unfair, this is probably the makeup you’d get with a fair selection. https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/north-dako...
People can hide their biases (or claim they can set them aside, which will often be acceptable during jury selection), and in a county with 30k people you're gonna run into people who recognize you at the grocery store a lot. This certainly wouldn't have been a pressure-free scenario.
It can be quite hard to get a jury to go against a locally powerful large employer in a small town.
I'm not a lawyer.
I believe it's a question of "who is found liable" and then "what is the damages" and then the damages are split between those who are found liable.
If it was Greenpeace and {Some Org} that were both found liable, then that could be split 90% {Some Org} and 10% Greenpeace.
However, if only Greenpeace was found liable it would be 100% Greenpeace despite how little interaction they had.
SLAPP as in Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
To keep the dissenting voices quiet and to scare other groups from protesting.
Modus operandi for many industries.
A SLAPP is a frivolous lawsuit that the plaintiff has no chance of winning. In this case they won a judgment, so it's the opposite of that.
That's not technically what a SLAPP is. The reason it is called a strategic lawsuit is frequently that it will cost the defendant so much to defend themselves that they opt to settle rather than risk that cost. Even if the plaintiff is unlikely to win, it is rarely a "no chance" situation, and with judge/district shopping, it is quite possible for large corporations to move further from "no chance" than an individual or non-profit might.
That is objectively not what happened here though, the point of SLAPP is that it's a frivolous suit that's meant to just exhaust the resources of the "dissenting voices". They won this suit and honestly it's not hard to believe that Greenpeace is guilty to some degree even if proving it is.
> the point of SLAPP is that it's a frivolous suit
The point is to shut people up. Lawyers don't like filing literally frivolous suits, that type of activity gets you disbarred.
In theory, yes. But does that actually happen IRL? I've never heard of a lawyer getting disbarred for the quality of suits he or she is filing.
Many years ago in Northern CA we had a lawyer that was basically going around filing suits against everyone she came in contact with as a way to pay the bills. She was eventually declared a "vexatious litigant" and had to get a judge's permission before she could sue anyone in the future, but they didn't disbar her.
Well it is very hard to believe they're guilty, at least to me. Too bad the news report does not provide any actual information about the case and the evidence (actual journalism beyond clickbaity headlines).
In environmental circles, Greenpeace is very well-known to be traitors working with big corporations to launder their image. They're opposed to sabotage and revolutionary tactics. Their activities are mostly fundraising and legal proceedings, and on the rare instance they perform so-called civil disobedience (such as deploying banners on nuclear plants), it is in very orderly fashion that doesn't provide much economic harm.
As a left-wing environmentalist, i wish such a strong voice as Greenpeace was capable to incite people to rise against the greedy corporations destroying our planet. I just don't see that happening, neither here in France nor in the USA.
> i wish such a strong voice as Greenpeace was capable to incite people to rise against the greedy corporations destroying our planet.
Posted from your iphone while driving to the gas station to fill up? Where did you fly to for your last vacation?
Not this tired nonsense again.
Contrasting specific technological and social artifacts with a form of economic organization and legal structures without noting how different they are is a cheap and weak form of argument.
If you want to insist that only greedy corporations could have made portable hand-held network connected computing devices possible, then make that point. If you want to insist that there could be no automobile or refueling system without a system in which corporate profits primarily are directed towards capital rather than labor, then make that point. If you find it impossible that powered flight would exist at a price where most people could afford it without specific laws controlling corporate liability and legal fiduciary responsibility, than make that point.
But "ah, so you use human-created technology while criticizing the organizations that make it" isn't really the winning argument that you appear to think it is.
What does any of that have to do with anything?
> If you want to insist that only greedy corporations could have made portable hand-held network connected computing devices possible, then make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. Doesn't matter who makes it or if they are "greedy." Physics doesn't care about human emotions.
> If you want to insist that there could be no automobile or refueling system without a system in which corporate profits primarily are directed towards capital rather than labor, then make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. Physics doesn't care about accounting.
> If you find it impossible that powered flight would exist at a price where most people could afford it without specific laws controlling corporate liability and legal fiduciary responsibility, than make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. It doesn't matter what the price to the end user is or who liability. Physics does not care about lawyers.
> But "ah, so you use human-created technology while criticizing the organizations that make it" isn't really the winning argument that you appear to think it is.
If your criticism is about global warming, then yes it is a wining argument because the organizations are irrelevant. It burns oil and emits CO2. Physics doesn't care about human organizations.
The GP made an observation about "greedy corporations".
You sarcastically wrote
> Posted from your iphone while driving to the gas station to fill up? Where did you fly to for your last vacation?
as if using any of those technologies means that you have no standing to criticize "greedy corporations".
I've pointed out the (potential) disconnect between the technologies and the corporations, and you've now wandered off into "fossil fuels do stuff, physics matters" which of course is true but as before, has nothing to do with someone criticizing what they see as/claim are "greedy corporations".
Nice try, but I'm not stupid enough to fall for your deflection. GP did not complain about "greedy corporations." He complained about "greedy corporations destroying our planet." They aren't destroying our planet. You, GP, and I are destroying our planet. But unlike you and GP, I am an adult and I don't try to blame other people for my actions.
> SLAPP as in Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
Unfortunately North Dakota is one of the minority of states without anti-SLAPP laws.
https://www.the-case.eu/latest/number-of-slapps-in-europe-co...
> Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace Fund or Greenpeace International
Why is something like this allowed to exist... Stacking entities and funneling wealth around in the guise of a noble cause.
International orgs usually need a company incorporated in every country they're working in. You need it to pay employees, for instance.
You're going to lose it when you discover that stacking entities and funneling wealth around happens as routinely as eating lunch, and it's the noble cause part that's the outlier here.
Countries usually require you to create a local corporation, non-profit, or similar, if you have any revenue or donations. The local entity is what will file the tax paperwork.
We need David Macaulay to add a book on corporate structures to his repertoire. Any organization operating at anywhere close to household-name scale is a collection of cooperating legal entities.
You know that 99% of companies with revenues above say $1B do exactly this, just in the guise of often less noble causes?
Fun fact, Monster Cables owns no patents or IP (or effectively none), it just licenses them all from the "wholly independent, arms-length" Monster Cables Bermuda, Inc. entity.
It may well not exist any more under the financial burden of this sentence.
Or maybe, just maybe, they actually did unreasonably damage the pipeline company's reputation, in a way that is outside the legally-recognized bounds of free speech. Maybe justice actually was done.
(Note well: I haven't been following this case closely enough to say. But you should at least consider that as a possibility.)
Does your theory pass the sniff test? How reasonable is it to believe that Greenpeace's "defamation" cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars? Why is $345 the correct three-digit number of millions for the reputation damage Greenpeace caused?
this is only possible if you can somehow square a pipeline company's activities as intersecting with the arc of justice. as it stands, they're actively hastening the degradation of land, water, wildlife, human life and surrounding climates everywhere they operate.
Regardless of what you think of pipelines, under the current system they have the protection of the law. Courts are judging based on what the law says, not on the sense of "justice" that you seem to be operating on. As you yourself said, they may not intersect.
kind of an insulting position to assume i (or anyone else you might be educating) don't know that courts ostensibly rule on law/precedent.
i'm specifically responding to your use of the word "justice" and how those two do not always align - it's a lack of precise definition, or a disagreement in terms. this is one of the clearest examples of that phenomenon that exists, especially when you consider the lengths the fossil fuel industry has gone to hide and misdirect evidence of the negative environmental impacts of their business model.
They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.
> how does this happen? did greenepeace just run a bad trial? or lose all public trust?
Alternative possibility: they were actually guilty. Seems likely. The idea that Greenpeace was intentionally spreading misinformation doesn't require a big leap of faith.
Unlike oil companies who would of course never do such a thing.
They sure do. They've also been sued for it, too, because it's bad. It's also bad for Greenpeace to do it.
There is absolutely no way the damage is that large and this seems to be mostly a revenge action by a community in which Greenpeace - or any other environmental organization - would never get a fair trial to begin with.
The article doesn't mention it, but it could be punitive damages
The climate can't sue if you lie about it.
Companies and people can.
> They specifically weren't found liable for on the ground activity, so the fact that only six employees were on the ground seems like a bit of a red herring.
I think that's not what the article is saying, although I read it that way too at first. Greenpeace USA, the organization whose six employees were on the ground, was found liable for "almost all claims"; it's only Greenpeace International and Greenpeace Fund, their sibling organizations, who were found not to be "responsible for the alleged on-the-ground harms committed by protesters".
Ah, good catch. I misread.
No, their lawyers did a fairly decent job of demonstrating that Greenpeace wasn't coordinating the radical protestors that were showing up to the protests, anymore than MAGA was coordinating all of the violent shootings by right-wingers last year.
They were never going to win the trial. More than half of the jury pool had ties to the pipeline industry. They were always going to find against Greenpeace, and they went to fairly extreme lengths to ignore the evidence presented to come up with a ridiculous damage award far in excess of the company's actual damages (even accounting for a punitive damage markup).
Will they win on appeal? Maybe pre-Trump they had a chance, but right-wing judges no longer feel bound by the law, reason, or equity.
Some of the jurors had financial ties Energy Transfer, the district is heavily conservative and economically dependent on the oil industry. The deck was massively stacked against Greenpeace at trial.
Energy Transfer had previously attempted other suits which failed to get any traction because the claims are essentially Trump-style conspiracy theories about who is "pulling the strings" and "paying for" a massive decentralized protest movement. But they got lucky on this one. One of the advantages of having so much money you can just burn it on questionable lawsuits until one succeeds.
North Dakota jury breaking things to please Daddy T. On a larger scale, jury trials for defamation are a ticking time bomb catastrophe, long term incompatible with free speech. Source: was on a defamation jury and it was an utter clown fiesta and pretty close to ended my remaining faith in the US legal system and the population as a whole.
Jury trials for defamation have been a thing since forever and haven't caused a catastrophe yet. Jury trials occasionally get things wrong as a matter of law, which is why we have an appeals process.
As one of the few developers based in North Dakota, I was NOT expecting to see ND at the top of hacker news this morning.
I lived very close to the protests. I won't comment on the politics but, 2016-2017 was very impactful on the community here.
In what way?
I'd like to hear your comments on what happened from your POV
Sounds like it's time for GreenPeace USA to follow the chemical industries example - do a corporate reorg, put all the liabilities in specific subsidiary and then declare bankrupacy for that subsidiary.
I assume that is the point of having a Greenpeace USA -- to shield Greenpeace International and other Greenpeace organizations from liability. And it seems to have mostly worked.
Looking at the history ( back in the 1970s )- it appears to be in part the reverse - when Greenpeace USA was created, the original greenpeace, based in Vancouver, had a quarter of a million debt - and there was a bit of a fight over it.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/12/11/TEXT-OMITTED-FROM-SO...
That’s specifically illegal under bankruptcy law. It’s called fraudulent transfer.
Yet large companies appear to get away with it all the time - for example the so called Texas two step.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy
In my view the best way to get this sort of stuff banned is to start using it yourself.
J&J tried it but was ultimately rejected last year.
Somewhat different circumstances.
Summarizing Matt Levine's various columns on the issue from memory:
1. J&J lost a lawsuit about talc and the winner was awarded $Xb (or maybe $XXXm, my memory is fuzzy) in damages.
2. J&J transferred $XXb to a new company.
3. It let the new company take on current and future liabilities for judgements on the talc issue.
4. J&J then had the new company declare bankruptcy. The bankruptcy process is designed to pay out money fairly to all creditors. The new company's only creditors were the plaintiffs in the lawsuit J&J lost + any future claimants. So this wasn't necessarily nefarious.
5. A judge rejected the bankruptcy because J&J had funded the company with $XXb and that was in excess of its current liabilities. As Levine put it, the company wasn't "bankrupt enough" yet.
I didn't keep up with the story after that so maybe I missed something.
Generally true, but one key point. Under bankruptcy law, you can give liabilities to a subsidiary, but you have to give the subsidiary enough money to pay the anticipated liabilities. That’s the reason why J&J gave the subsidiary so much money. Otherwise, the bankruptcy would have been dismissed as a fraudulent transfer. The bankruptcy court approved the bankruptcy filing, but on appeal the Third Circuit dismissed the bankruptcy because the subsidiary wasn’t bankrupt enough. Basically, in order to avoid fraudulent transfer law, J&J had to write the subsidiary a big check, but that money made the subsidiary ineligible for bankruptcy.
(Disclosure: I was on the team that won the appeal against J&J on this issue. My comment above is about the public record.)
> So the Texas Two-Step supports the idea that companies can’t just put liabilities in a subsidiary and put it into bankruptcy. The Texas Two-Step is an effort to work around that rule.
Sorry I'm having trouble parsing this because the first and second sentences seem to contradict each other. Or I'm just bad at reading.
> Disclosure: I was on the team that won the appeal against J&J on this issue
That's actually pretty cool. If I may ask, given that LTL was funded with many multiples of its liabilities, why was the bankruptcy appealed?
> Sorry I'm having trouble parsing this because the first and second sentences seem to contradict each other. Or I'm just bad at reading.
Sorry, I was unclear. You have a law that says that pre-bankruptcy transfers that were made to avoid liability can be voided: 11 USC 548: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/11/548. So say J&J put the liabilities into a subsidiary, but didn’t give it a check. The creditors would have been able to void the transfer of liability and give it back to J&J by proving that J&J transferred the liabilities that the subsidiary couldn’t pay.
To work around that, J&J did a particular formulation of the Texas Two-Step where it gave the subsidiary a big check to pay for the anticipated liabilities. The fact that J&J had to do that shows that the fraudulent transfer law does have some teeth. It was the reason J&J had to take the approach that ultimately got the subsidiary kicked out of bankruptcy court.
> If I may ask, given that LTL was funded with many multiples of its liabilities, why was the bankruptcy appealed
So the amicus brief from Public Justice—which I had no involvement with—does a good job of explaining the public interest concerns: https://www.tzlegal.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2022.07.0.... Bankruptcy court is a debtor-friendly forum and gives debtors tremendous leverage over creditors.
> The bankruptcy court didn’t agree that having too much money was a grounds for dismissing the bankruptcy filing. The appellate court reversed, finding that a company that had too much money was legally precluded from filing for bankruptcy.
I understood that. My question was why challenge the bankruptcy if there was apparently already enough money for everyone who won? Why not just go to bankruptcy court and pick up your check?
EDIT: Looks like this question was answered with an edit to the post I replied. Thanks!
Another commenter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224462 said that
1. funding commitments have been unenforceable in other Texas two step bankruptcies
2. allowing a bankruptcy court to figure out payments would turn all the thousands of plaintiffs' cases into a defacto class action (my understanding of what this person wrote).
I'm not sure what you mean. I think we are saying the same thing. The strategy to use Texas Two Step failed in 2025 and J&J gave up, and now they are going back to the regular way of resolving the litigation.
The thread we're in started with the discussion of fraudulent transfers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220263
You said the Texas Two Step can't be used for fraudulent transfers (or at least, that's how I interpreted) and offered J&J's case as an example. My reply to that is J&J's Texas Two Step failed for a different reason, unrelated to fraudulent transfers.
No.
My OP said that Texas Two step was used all the time. I said J&J tried to use Texas Two Step and it ultimately failed. And yes it did fail mostly because it was not being used in good faith.
> And yes it did fail mostly because it was not being used in good faith
As of today, judgments against J&J total to less than $10b. J&J committed up to $61.5b to LTL, the company it spun off. Simple arithmetic shows us all current judgments will be satisfied. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222778
The judge used this $61.5b commitment - which J&J made to ensure LTL would pay for all the lawsuits J&J lost - as proof that LTL wasn't actually bankrupt. Which is weird but also correct.
Where is the bad faith today? I mean it's possible J&J has done some internal analysis and expects to be on the hook for more than that in the future. Or there's some other arcane legal issue I don't understand. And in that sense committing the $61.5b is a smart way of capping their losses while still looking like good guys today. There's no evidence of that right now though.
To re-iterate, the bankruptcy was rejected because of how it was structured. Not because there was an attempt to dodge liability. To me that's a more damning indictment of the legal system because it implies liability dodging might have worked if it were structured right.
Nah, Matt Levine is an absolute Texas Two Step apologist, something that made me lose a lot of respect for him.
He repeatedly contorts himself into pretzels trying to defend it (why?) and into equal pretzels avoiding exploring the two elephants in the rule:
1. He (and those involved) claim that the process is "actually, truly, intended to be solely for the benefit of the plaintiffs suing us", and that defendants are doing them a favor, going out of their way to spin off these entities that are flimsy houses of cards.
2. Is it just a coincidence that of the firms who've gone through the Texas Two Step process, that they've managed to get away with not having to pay ninety per cent of court-ordered liabilities, and in at least one case, ninety-eight per cent?
Why on earth would these companies bend over backwards to do something that they claim has zero benefit for them, and is only truly intended to help streamline and optimize plaintiff's efforts in suing them?
Why is it even called the Texas Two Step? Is it because:
1. it assists claimants and plaintiffs (their adversaries) to bond together and present one solid unified case against you, or...
2. because it assists them to elegantly dance around their liabilities?
Levine and the firms and companies he's carrying water for insist the name has nothing to do with the second point.
In the JJ case, Levine's apologism of "they weren't bankrupt enough, yet" is horseshit.
JJCI was funded to the tune of $2B. Slightly less than the $61.5B of liability, you'll agree.
After the bankruptcy was rejected, the Judge had said that the bankruptcy might be necessary at some point in the future, but "now wasn't the time".
JJCI re-filed bankruptcy proceedings three hours later.
All these apologists are taking the piss.
> JJCI was funded to the tune of $2B. Slightly less than the $61.5B of liability, you'll agree
Your numbers are all wrong.
Here's a law firm's summary of all the judgments to date against J&J: https://www.sokolovelaw.com/product-liability/talcum-powder/...
These don't add up anywhere close to $10b, let alone $61.5b.
$61.5b is the amount that J&J ultimately agreed to pay the new company (LTL) that it spun off to take over the liabilities.
This is from the court that rejected the bankruptcy:
"we cannot agree LTL was in financial distress when it filed its Chapter 11 petition. The value and quality of its assets, which include a roughly $61.5 billion payment right against J&J and New Consumer, make this holding untenable."
https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/222003p.pdf
My translation: "This new company can get up to $61.5b from J&J but says it's in financial straits. Bankruptcy denied."
I'm aware the Texas Two Step is used by companies to get out of paying what they legally owe. It's unclear to me if this particular case is a good example of that today because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b and that's much more than the judgements against them.
If in 20 years all the judgements end up being more like $80b and J&J says "Whoopsie, money's run out" then I guess we can call shenanigans.
I don't know what Matt Levine has said about the Texas Two Step outside of this case.
> JJCI re-filed bankruptcy proceedings three hours later
What did they change in their application? What happened to the new filing?
> I'm aware the Texas Two Step is used by companies to get out of paying what they legally owe. It's unclear to me if this particular case is a good example of that today ...
They are using the same law firm (Jones Day) as the others. It's a perfectly good example.
> ... because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b and that's much more than the judgements against them.
Actually, the $2B and $8.9B proposals in LTL's two bankruptcy proceedings made the funding from J&J contingent on claimants and future claimants accepting the bankruptcy, i.e. its J&J effectively trying to shoehorn this into an informal class action - plaintiffs can choose to form a class action, defendants are not able to force them into one, but this effectively would. So it seems unlikely that J&J would ever be on the hook for $61.5B. Indeed, HoldCo, the parent of LTL, in turn owned by J&J would only ever be funded to a maximum of $30B.
> Here's a law firm's summary of all the judgments to date against J&J
to date. There's many many more (thirty-eight thousand) cases that have not been adjudicated, in fact.
> because J&J has committed to paying at least $61.5b
Where do you think that number came from? J&J playing good corporate samaritan, or knowing that they still have many, many more cases winding through the courts, or in discovery, than have had final judgments rendered so far?
Good for J&J. They've actually only paid $2B - of the $10B of judgments that you yourself acknowledge. Good for J&J. And they've committed to funding $61.5B? How's that worked out for other companies doing this?
Georgia Pacific, in the same spot, committed to an initial funding of their T2S entity, and to review this further as needed. In the end, they funded it to the tune of $175M. And then told the court that the entity was entirely independent from GP and they had no obligation to do any such thing.
St Gobain, in the same spot, committed to funding to the tune of $50B, and ended up putting in less than $100M and refusing anything further.
So audacious was St Gobain that they were laid into by the court:
> Gross testified that Saint-Gobain repeatedly misrepresented its intent in creating the subsidiary that eventually filed for bankruptcy, calling executives’ testimony and other statements “misleading” and “not truthful.” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Craig Whitley followed Gross’s testimony last August with factual findings that included his own blistering critique of the executives’ statements as “contrary to the evidence,” saying the company’s story “strains credibility.”
Four major companies have tried the Texas Two Step lately. All of them have used the same one law firm, again, Jones Day. Three of them (J&J being the fourth) have managed to drastically under-deliver on their commitments and liabilities and have emerged unscathed as a result.
Trane Technologies, same thing.
Weird that LTL was formed in North Carolina, where this scheme seems to work, yet J&J has no corporate presence there (headquartered in NJ)
But somehow, J&J, and Matt Levine would love us to believe that this time, somehow, it'll be different.
> What did they change in their application?
They changed the number from $2B to $8B and filed bankruptcy again. It was again dismissed. The first time, the courts as you said described it as an untenable position. Now, they were more annoyed, saying that the application was made in actively bad faith.
"Johnson & Johnson would later make a third attempt at resolving talc litigation through bankruptcy in 2024, which also failed. The company continued to face thousands of lawsuits alleging its talc products were contaminated with asbestos and caused cancer.
The repeated bankruptcy dismissals established important precedent limiting the ability of financially healthy corporations to use the Texas Two-Step strategy to avoid mass tort litigation."
This is from another mesothelioma law firm (important to note that J&J has actually resolved many of the mesothelioma claims against it, ~95%. But the vast majority of claims are around asbestos, and have a much clearer causality, typically resulting in larger verdicts).
April 2025, J&J, sorry, LTL, have since tried, and failed, to file a fourth bankruptcy. They're getting increasingly nervous that they won't be able to sidestep liability.
There's also this hugely perverse incentive with all of these "commitment to fund"s:
"You injured me and have been ordered to compensate me. But in order to do so I have to hope you continue to prosper, potentially injuring others along the way, so I get my compensation. I can choose between getting you shut down, but potentially not being compensated, or being compensated but knowing that you go on to be able to do this to others."
Your post boils down to "funding commitments are worthless and unenforceable", which if true is
1. surprising to me, a layman. and
2. means it's just as well J&J's ploy didn't work.
All the rest about J&J using the same law firm etc. doesn't make for much of a smoking gun for me.
You're also right about the perverse incentives. But it would be equally unfair if the last 37k of those 38k plaintiffs didn't get any money because the first 1000 to win were awarded all of it.
Tl;dr J&J may or may not be playing fair. Is there another orderly process to ensure all plaintiffs are treated fairly?
Yup. It's "weird" that all of these companies claim that "swear to god, we fully intend to honor our obligations", then all of them use this one law firm who specializes in doing exactly the opposite and "oops, look what happened, we have no more legal obligation, that belongs now to this other entity that we said we'd fund but ... somehow ... didn't. Or certainly not anywhere near where we said we would."
But there are definitely apologists and deniers of it, even right here on HN. Or "you don't know that's what's going to happen, we owe it to them to wait and see", even as you watch the exact same law firm guide another company through the exact same process in the exact same way, but somehow, maybe, this time, it'll have a different outcome.
It’s only illegal if they don’t get away with it. Most get away with it in corporate America. If bad actors are going to push the bounds of the legal framework, good actors should as well when the rules don’t matter. Rule of “Fuck you make me.” To improve odds of success, one could operate from a position of being judgement proof, organizing corporate and legal entities accordingly from a charging perspective. Laws are not objective, it’s all interpretative dance. Know how to dance for the performance you choose to participate in.
The proper way to do it would be to let Greenpeace USA go insolvent and then immediately form GreenPeace America as a new entity unhindered by the liabilities of the old one.
This tactic has been used by our current President.
Saving this thread in case anyone ever tries to claim this forum is full of intelligent discussion.
Life pro tip: A 345 million dollar judgment against a company worth less than 10% of that for the crime of maybe telling some protesters to engage in direct action against a company leaking oil into their water supply is not remotely sane, no matter how 'legal' the jury of oil-connected people may say it was.
> maybe telling some protesters to engage in direct action against a company leaking oil into their water supply
Sounds like you put the maybe in the wrong place. The jury found that they did do that. And you have no evidence whatsoever that they leaked any oil into the water supply.
I find it hard to believe these people did 345 million in damage.
If I boycott a company, am I legally responsible for any lost profit that happens as a result?
Of course not, but that's completely unrelated to what's happening here.
No, but if you get your friends to torch their warehouse you are
Depends. Did you incite crimes?
Does anyone know what assets Greenpeace USA has? I imagine Greenpeace international will set up Greenpeace USA 2.0, all the volunteers/employees will move over, and the original will just go bankrupt.
Greg Hirsch got paid
Can't make a tomelette...
If you are going to break the law under capitalism, you must do it sustainably. Facebook, Apple, et al have shown that the latency of judicial pipeline usually means a billion dollar in fines comes after several billion in profits. You profit from the lag between the crime and the consequence.
I don't think social justice has that same profit pipeline, but I am not sure. There is an asymmetry in the type of evil our society allows.
No the way to do it is this:
Break the law, make $1B of illegal money, then get dragged to court and pay a $200M fine - while you keep most of the profit and your market position you illegally gained.
Bonus: Shield all managers from personal accountability, best in a way that they got their bonus and salary and moved on a long time ago before the verdict hits.
Best: Not get to court, but make an $100M outside court settlement.
That's not true, they have an extremely robust pipeline in the form of donations that stream in as long as they publicly Do Something.
They just need to do what oil & gas (and other "dirty" industries) do to avoid reputcussions: form lots of shell companies to shield the parent. It becomes a hydra of corporations kinda like terrorist cells.
>There is an asymmetry in the type of evil our society allows.
Makes sense. Because society is evil, therefore our society allows evil.
It would be very easy for an energy company to make hundreds of thousands of donations through "private supporters" to Greenpeace so as to cause problems for their competitors without liability, including defamation, and violent protests. They could be profiting by encouraging angry kids to go ruin their lives, and there would be no consequences for the executives behind it all. In fact, if this were actually happening, then in this story they would have just gotten back half of their marketing budget, which they can recycle for another violent campaign against this or any other competing energy company. And college kids around the world would help to supplement that marketing budget by donating to what they think is an environmental cause.
Look at who Just Stop Oil is funded by and whether you think people like their actions.
That's a hell of a cynnical conspiracy but then again, people like Jill Stein exist.
The Harvard educated doctor, magna cum laude, with a long history of fighting for a better America for all Americans.
The Jewish lady who was smeared as a Russian agent because she was at a diplomatic dinner that Putin also attended.
The woman who challenged election results in 2016, only for the response to be to make it harder to question election results (and that certainly never blew-back on all of us).
The lady who was then put under Senate investigation for two years over the so-called collusion with Russia which turned up precisely zero evidence.
Who put up the single best fight against two entrenched pro-genocide parties of anyone else in America's 350 million people.
The 2024 candidate with the highest vote to campaign funds ratio of any candidate by a factor of about ten despite having a tiny fraction of the election coverage.
What exactly are you saying the comparison is here? That Americans tend to cheer for the villains and boo the heroes just because the media tells them to?
This is funny. I didn't know who Jill Stein is, so I asked an LLM about how she is relevant. Instead of explaining how she might be involved in evil conspiracies, it thinks that Jill Stein is relevant because, "like a charged college kid," she was apparently at this Greenpeace protest! Hilarious.
She ran for President in 2024. Where were you?
Mossad is trafficking children to billionaires for blackmail material, and it's just led directly to a war on Iran because the president of the US is in CSAM.
No conspiracy is too cynical. If you can think of it, they can think of it.
I think climate change is a massive and real problem. And that we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels quickly. But I would actually be very happy to see Greenpeace fold as a result of this. I think they’ve been on the wrong side of many important issues, including this one.
I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
Also for the ND pipeline, I think it does relatively little to change the economics of fossil fuels. And thus does relatively little to change our path to sustainable energy. But it does a lot geopolitically. Having more local oil means the trigger-happy US government is less likely to start wars to ensure access to oil. Heck even the Iran conflict this week stems back to the 1953 CIA-instituted coup which was half motivated by protecting access to oil.
Hot take: decarbonization is a policy issue that should be pursued primarily through incentives to increase production and quality of clean alternatives. Not by throttling supply of oil. Look at the electrical grid. Solar and wind are just cheaper than fossil fuels now which means the decarbonization is economically inevitable.
I have some inside knowledge here. When I was in college, I was very idealistic. I was in a special Greenpeace program where they took college students and trained them to become environmental activists. Picture a semester-long, hands-on training course.
You actually fully go out into the field to run campaigns and meet everyone from the President of Greenpeace to the front-end activist hanging banners and whatnot.
I actually liked the President and DC lobbyist folks more than the weridos out and about dropping banners and doing the extreme stuff.
I walked away being kind of turned off from the Organization and realized a lot of these folks were not pragmatic and more dogmatic than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I am very grateful and had a blast, but I dropped out of college and became a software engineer instead of an activist.
I had a similar experience with the US EPA while in undergrad. It was a shorter experience, but it really changed my view of the organization.
This case is not important because of Greenpeace, it's important because of the implications for free speech in the US. They are not being bankrupted because they took the wrong stance on nuclear, they're being bankrupted for supposed defamation and incitement against a major energy corporation.
This is a precedent that will be used to attack all kinds of civil society organizations when they threaten the profits of major corporate interests. Including the civil society organizations which you do agree with.
I think our society would be better off if everybody did less incitement in their political dialogue. It's become all too common for political discourse to become unhinged. So in that sense, I think this precedent is also fine.
What does setting things on fire have to do with freedom of speech?
I think this is how it goes: The people who set things on fire weren't directly associated with Greenpeace. But the argument is that Greenpeace's rhetoric incited them to do so. So it becomes a freedom of speech issue. If you tell people something is evil and must be burned, are you responsible for that thing getting torched?
> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power
I think the nuclear industry didn't do itself any favors. And the oil companies didn't want it to succeed either and did its best to hobble it. The environmental groups are a convenient patsy to take the blame for the outcome. If Greenpeace is so powerful why hasn't it been able to end whaling or the oil industry?
I agree. In the long term we need to reduce fossil fuel usage but in the short term, restricting pipeline construction means that more petroleum products are transported by rail cars which is a lot dirtier and more dangerous. We have to take a pragmatic harm minimization approach rather than being idealistic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Union_Pacific_oil_train_f...
> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
I don't have much time for Greenpeace. Much of their activism has never been science based, and usually involves criminal acts against property. History will not be kind to them.
Their only highlight is 'saving' the whales. For a while.
won't someone think of the property??!?
Yes I will think of the property because private property rights are critical and I 100% support private property owners using violence to defend their property from vandals and thieves.
prosperity comes from property, just add sí /s
If this pipeline was going through disneyland, i don't think you'd hear popular arguments about disney trying to ruin the oil economy.
I think that’s half right. We are absolutely horrendous to natives around here. But that’s not why Greenpeace got involved, nor why most of the left cares about this issue.
If the pipeline was going through Disneyland I think you’d still see the same people up in arms protesting. They’d just be searching for a different justification.
This is a complete load of shit. Oil is trucked back and forth over those roads all day and night, and that has a much higher leakage rate than a pipeline. NIMBYs never come out and say they just don't want something built. They always have some bullshit excuse like this.
I mean what you just said is the huge load of shit. There are interesting differences in risk and pollution between trucking and piping, but they’re not nearly as black and white as you claim and they don’t require acrimony. Calm the hell down?
But restricting supply raises prices and naturally encourages sustainable energy. That kind of change is self reinforcing. Government incentives disappear at the change of every administration.
No, restricting supply when it exists just turns people paying the higher prices against you. When the supply restrictions are in fundamentals it can work for you. When supply restrictions are on something few people care about it can work for you. However the majority of people (particularly in ND) drive and feel the cost of gas - often they feel these costs even more than they really affect the budget because they are visible every time you buy it in ways the things that have a larger effect on their budget are not.
If you want to encourage sustainable energy you need to make that your focus. Make it cheaper. Ignore oil and fight laws that make it harder to build sustainable energy. ND has great wind potential (they get 40% of their electric from wind already), but it could be better (they have a small population - which means they can export wind energy to Minnesota or if we build transmission lines even farther).
When you focus on raising oil prices you ensure that your side gets voted out in the next election and your gains are undone. When you focus on building renewable energy you get something that can stay. (Just don't build only on the white house as that can be quickly removed - build everywhere so removal is expensive)
Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set across all supply sources. Restricting its movement from Canada to the US doesn’t actually change the price much at all. It just makes the supply more vulnerable to disruption. That dirty shale oil only comes out of the ground when prices are really high. Otherwise it’s not worth it. If prices are high it will come out of the ground and get burned. The only question is where and who has access to it.
It's already too late. We passed the point of no return. There was a blip where every outlet was saying that the point of no return was like 6 months away than nothing.. We shot right past it.
Strange take. What does that mean? Give up because we can’t do anything - “it’s already too late”? So burn all the oil because YOLO?
Or maybe those people drawing hard lines in the sand were exaggerating to drive urgency and get attention? Sometimes people whose stated goals you agree with say and do things which are wrong.
It’s too late. Look at the science.
Also I never mentioned just give up. I just said it’s already too late. That’s reality. What you do next is your choice. But don’t put words in my mouth.
It's never too late, that's not what "the science" says it's what the clickbait vulture news bullshit you're reading is saying. The real science on the matter is that every day things get just a little bit worse, and every improvement makes things just a little bit better. There's no magic cliff, no point of no return, just one day after another.
There are tipping points, when warming accelerates and becomes irreversible.
There’s some debate in “the science” about how quickly we’ll reach that point. Limiting warming to +2°C was not a scientific position; it was political, based on what people thought was achievable. Before the Paris Agreement, 2° was not considered “safe”.
Anyway, it turns out we’re going to zoom past 2° in the next couple of decades.
Wait til you hear about Steven Donziger.
Steven is a lawyer who helped Ecuador sue Chevron who was polluting massively. The Ecuadorians won and secured an historic $9.5 billion judgment because it was so egregious. Did that end the matter? No.
Chevron ran to American courts and argued that Donziger helped secure this judgment by committing fraud. I believe the evidence of this was a video showing a minister and Donziger at a social gathering. The court ruled in Chevron's favor. This made the judgment unenforceable in the US.
As part of all this, Chevron wanted Donziger to hand over all communications and electronic devices associated with the Ecuador prosecution. That is of course attorney-client privilege. But the court agreed and Donziger refused.
But it didn't end there. Chevron (through their law firm) lobbied the Department of Justice to criminally prosecure Donziger for this. The DoJ declined.
But it didn't end there either. Chevron asked the court, and they agreed, to appoint Chevron's own law firm to conduct a private criminal prosecution. You might be asking "what is that?" and you'd be right to be confused. It rarely happens but a civil court can pursue a private criminal prosecution.
Donziger was convicted, disbarred and spent years in home detention over this whole thing. The Appeals Court affirmed all this and the Supreme Court declined to intervene.
So does it surprise me that Greenpeac can get hit by a $345M judgment for hurting the feelings of an oil company? No, no it does not.
> Chevron ran to American courts and argued that Donziger helped secure this judgment by committing fraud. I believe the evidence of this was a video showing a minister and Donziger at a social gathering. The court ruled in Chevron's favor. This made the judgment unenforceable in the US.
If you're interested in this story, I would encourage you to read the full contents of the ruling in this US case. (https://theamazonpost.com/wp-content/uploads/Chevron-Ecuador...) It's long but relatively easy reading, and it contains a lot more evidence against Donziger's side of the story than a video of a social gathering. In particular, it seems absolutely unambiguous to me that his team blackmailed one of the Ecuadorian judges into giving him favorable rulings, implementing the theory repeatedly found in his personal notebooks that "the only way the court will respect us is if they fear us".
I'll call you a pdf, put banners on every utility pole where you live, and even set your bicycle on fire. Will it count as I just "hurt your feelings"?
US truely is a banana republic.
Drive less, if possible.
So they almost certainly are guilty, but the damages seem exorbitant
Depends. What's the overhead of delaying construction, replacing pipes and valves etc. lost revenue ( like car rental)?
Hard to believe you’re downvoted in an organic way…