This one took a while to resolve. I wonder how it would have turned out if it had taken longer.
There's an oil company that wants to keep secret the details about the wells it has drilled in the North Slope of Alaska. But Alaska has passed a law that says that once the wells have been drilled, the company has to provide details about those wells to the state, which then keeps this information private for two years but releases it to the public thereafter, unless such a release would reveal trade secret information of the oil company. The oil company sues, claiming that the state statute is preempted by the federal law that opened up the North Slope to potential oil extraction. And the oil company wins in the district court.
The state files its appeal in 2023, and both sides file their briefs. The case then gets heard quite rapidly; the stat's reply brief was filed on March 4, 2024, and oral argument is held on May 20, 2024.
The day after oral argument, submission of the case is vacated. The panel wants the views of the United States. So there's another round of briefing. The United States files its brief in September of 2024 and says that it agrees with Alaska that there's no federal preemption.
Alaska, of course, is thrilled. The oil company, less so. It files its response to the United States in January 2025. And then the case sits for a while. (Probably, in part, because it's now a "holdover" case from the prior law clerks. Lower priority.)
But here we are in late May of 2026 and the Ninth Circuit now resolves the case, reversing the district court in a unanimous opinion and finding no preemption.
As I thought about the timing of this case, I couldn't help but wonder if it would have come out the same way if the initial appeal would have been resolved along the more traditional timeline, with a substantial delay between the filing of the briefs and the oral arguments. Let's say, for example, that the initial briefs were all finished in late 2024, oral argument was eight or nine months later, and then the panel asked for the position of the United States, which filed its brief sometime in early 2026.
You may perhaps recall that some significant events transpired at around that time. I suspect that had it been the new Trump administration, rather than the Biden administration, that had filed in the amicus brief requested by the panel, the position taken by the United States with respect to this issue may have been markedly different than it was. (For example, check out this Department of Justice press release with respect to a different oil exploration case earlier this year. It's quite a bit different in both tone and content to the amicus brief filed in the present case.)
So it was interesting to me to see if timing mattered in this one. Maybe it would have come out the same way regardless notwithstanding whatever position the United States took on the preemption issue.
Or maybe not.
