The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions each year but only agrees to hear a fraction of them. Sometimes this means the court overlooks important legal issues—the justices have avoided major cases on the Fourth Amendment in multiple recent terms, for example. More often than not, however, the court dispenses with a variety of petitions that aren’t worth its time or energy.

Alabama v. California falls into the latter category. A coalition of 18 Republican state attorneys general is trying to block Democratic state attorneys general from suing oil and gas companies under their own state laws in their own state courts. The case is instructive not because it is a particularly strong lawsuit but because it shows how conservatives will try to use the courts in the years to come.

The Supreme Court has two forms of jurisdiction over lawsuits. Nearly all cases heard by the justices fall under its appellate jurisdiction, meaning that the lawsuit was originally filed in a lower state or federal court. Nearly every Supreme Court case that you have ever heard of was first tried or considered by a lower court, then subsequently reviewed by the justices on appeal.

The high court also occasionally hears cases under its original jurisdiction, with the plaintiffs filing the lawsuit directly before the justices to hear it in the first, or original, instance. Original jurisdiction cases are rare because the Constitution limits them to a narrow series of disputes. One of them—indeed, the only relevant one these days—is when two states sue each other.

This case did not truly begin with a dispute between two states, however. It instead arose because of a dispute between a half-dozen Democratic-led states and the oil industry. In September 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the Golden State would sue five major oil producers—BP, Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, and Shell—in California state courts for what the state described as “more than 50 years of deception, cover-up, and damage that have cost California taxpayers billions of dollars in health and environmental impacts.” State officials termed the lawsuit as “State of California v. Big Oil.”

“For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us—covering up the fact that they’ve long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet. It has been decades of damage and deception,” Newsom said in a statement when the lawsuit was announced. “Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heat waves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells. California taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill. California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable.”

The lawsuit is still ongoing after a San Francisco court........

© New Republic