Submitted by tuesday in USA (edited )

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/01/exxonmobil-texas-law-rule-102-silence-critics-california-lawsuits/

So this is a lot and it's all terrible. Here's the breakdown.

There are a bunch of municipal offices in California who are suing ExxonMobil for billions of dollars in damages caused by wildfires. These suits allege that Exxon broke state law by misrepresenting and burying evidence of accurate climate science information and that caused the conditions for these wildfires.

ExxonMobil is replying to this by saying that these suites are trying to suppress EM's first amendment protection of free speech and that they're also a breech of Texas sovereignty because Exxon is based in Texas (this one feels too wild to get anywhere).

Generally to compel someone for deposition (fact finding pretrial step where witnesses are called to answers questions, under oath, by the attorney with regards to the lawsuit) you have to have a lawsuit filed. However, in Texas there's something called Rule 202 which allows an attorney to compel someone to depose on the potential for trial. So, there's no lawsuit, they just want to compel people to come to court to provide depositions in case Exxon is going to bring a counter-suit.

This is of course legal bullying. But it's Texas and they love to bully California, I have no doubt that this is going to be granted by the Texas Supreme Court, after all Greg Abbot sent a letter to the court giving it a thumbs up. If this works I can see Exxon doing the same thing to all of the other states that are suing them for consumer fraud for their complicity in our current climate disaster.

These suits against Exxon are all dependent on the law that companies are not allowed to defraud their consumers, under section 5(b) of the Federal Trades Commission Act (businesses are barred from any unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce), but there's two things that I think that the Exxon lawyers are thinking of.

The first is Citizen's United which holds that the access to rights free speech for political speech do not depend on the speaker, so it could be an individual person, or some association of people. Corporate personhood is important for free speech defenses.

And the second is that there's current precedent from Rickert v Public Disclosure Commission (aka Rickert v Washington) which holds that:

"The notion that the government, rather than the people, may be the final arbiter of truth in political debate is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment."

So, when you put these two together we see that the Exxon argument is that climate science is a matter of political speech, that Exxon has a first amendment protected right to, and that states cannot then deem what is or isn't fact about what Exxon has said with regards to climate science.

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