When New York City sued five oil companies over climate change in 2018, it did something the California cities had not: it filed in federal court. Hilary Schein asked why.
In January 2018, New York City sued BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell, seeking to recover the costs of adapting the city to climate change. The suit joined a wave of municipal climate cases, but its procedural posture stood out. The California municipalities that had sued the same companies filed in state court and then fought hard against removal to federal court. New York City walked into federal court on its own, invoking diversity jurisdiction — even though the defendants in these cases had made plain that federal court was the forum they preferred.
Writing as a staff contributor for the Georgetown Environmental Law Review, Hilary Schein treated the choice as a puzzle worth solving and offered three explanations. The first was publicity: the suit was announced alongside the mayor’s plan to divest the city’s pension funds from fossil fuels, and a federal filing may have been part of positioning the city as a national climate leader rather than a bet on where the case would fare best. The second was strategy: plaintiffs’ counsel had spoken openly about a coordinated series of city suits designed to pressure the industry toward a comprehensive settlement, which would make the forum less consequential. The third was pragmatism: the city may have wanted to sidestep the removal-and-remand fights bogging down the California cases, may have judged New York’s state courts no friendlier to the claims, or may have worried about personal jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants in state court.
The rest of the story is now known. The district court dismissed the case later in 2018, and the Second Circuit affirmed in City of New York v. Chevron Corp., 993 F.3d 81 (2d Cir. 2021), holding that the city’s state-law claims could not be used to regulate global emissions. The forum question Hilary identified — whether a plaintiff’s choice of court signals something about its real objectives — turned out to matter a great deal.
Hilary is now a shareholder in the firm’s Miami office, where forum selection is not an academic exercise: her practice spans complex commercial disputes, aviation matters, and business and shareholder litigation in which where a case is heard can shape how it ends.
Read: New York City’s Curious Jurisdictional Choice in its Fight Against “Big Oil” — Georgetown Environmental Law Review (online), March 9, 2018
About Hilary Schein
Hilary Schein is a shareholder in the firm’s Miami office, where she represents corporate and individual clients in state and federal courts in complex commercial litigation, including business and shareholder disputes, aviation, contract, and construction and condominium matters. A Miami native, she earned her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Senior Editor of the Georgetown Environmental Law Review, and her B.A. from Barnard College of Columbia University.
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