The BP BI Bundle Ruling: Federal Statutory Displacement of General Maritime Law (Part Ⅱ)

摘要

Part Ⅰ of this two-part study probed within the context of the 2010 BP Macondo Well blowout whether and to what extent the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA) displaces general maritime law negligence tort remedies for private economic and property losses. Part I disagreed with the U.S. District Courts ruling in In re Oil Spill by the Oil Rig Deepwater Horizon (hereinafter Bl Bundle) that these remedies survive OPA essentially unscathed. Part II's province is twofold. It critiques the rulings "silence means approval" canon on the basis of a framework it constructs to illuminate otherwise indeterminate U.S. Supreme Court displacement jurisprudence and policy. It then turns to B1 Bundles reliance on the Supreme Court's rulings in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker and Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Toumsend, exposing palpable inconsistencies-termed here "category errors"-that undermine the precedential force attributed to them by Bl Bundle.