Leading environmental law practitioners recognized by The Best Lawyers in America.
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超級基金
Legal issues related to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund) require experienced counsel ready to guide you every step of the way, whether over a site listing challenge or a liability dispute that takes you all the way to the US Supreme Court. Squire Sanders can provide it. Over the past two decades, our environmental lawyers have handled hundreds of Superfund and equivalent state law matters on behalf of industrial, commercial and municipal clients throughout the United States. We have Superfund experience in every US EPA region and in 48 states. More than 100 of our engagements have pertained to sites on the US EPA's National Priorities List (NPL). Our experience includes prosecuting and defending private cost recovery actions at the district court, court of appeals and the US Supreme Court level. We have experience defending unilateral agency cleanup orders under CERCLA Section 106; defending natural resource damage actions; negotiating consent decrees with the US EPA, the US Department of Justice and their state counterparts; organizing potentially responsible party groups, challenging NPL site listings; directing remedial investigations and feasibility studies; and litigating insurance coverage for environmental claims.
Our clients include major municipalities and other public bodies, real estate developers, lenders, privately held businesses and large industrial entities in the aerospace, semiconductor, mining, automotive, iron and steel, pulp and paper, chemical, waste treatment and petroleum fields, among others.
Notable Superfund engagements include:
- Representing Cooper Industries in securing a landmark victory before the US. Supreme Court in Cooper Industries, Inc. v. Aviall Services, Inc., 543 U.S. 157 (2004). In a 7-2 decision, the Court squarely adopted Cooper’s position that private parties may not seek contribution under Section 113 of CERCLA unless they have first been sued.
- Litigating in two courts of appeal whether liable working parties can seek to impose joint and several liability upon their fellow private parties under Section 107 of CERCLA, or are limited to seeking equitable contribution under Section 113. Minyard Enterprises, Inc. v. Southeastern Chemical & Solvent Co., 184 F.3d 373 (4th Cir. 1999); The Pinal Creek Group v. Newmont Mining Corp., 118 F.3d 1298 (9th Cir. 1996), cert. denied, 522 U.S. 1106 (1998).
- Persuading the Northern District of Indiana, after a bench trial, to assign our client a zero share of liability in private-party litigation brought by a group of working parties; our client had provided used foundry sand containing minute amounts of hazardous substances for use as cover material at the site. Ninth Avenue Remedial Group v. Allis-Chalmers, et al., 53 Env't Rep. Cases 2101 (BNA) (N.D. Ind. 2001).
- Successfully challenging EPA's attempt to use its "aggregation policy" to include a client's coke plant property within a larger NPL site, in order to support a unilateral enforcement order. Mead Corp. v. Browner, 100 F.3d 152 (D.C. Cir. 1996).
- Prevailing in the first case to squarely hold that trustees and other fiduciaries could be held personally liable as owners under Superfund, prompting a 1996 Congressional amendment of CERCLA now codified at 42 U.S.C. Section 9607 (n). City of Phoenix v. Garbage Service Co., 816 F. Supp. 564 (D. Ariz. 1993), 827 F. Supp. 600 (D. Ariz. 1993).
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