CategoryLegal

A $3,800 textbook caper is latest sign of Amazon’s arrogance

A

Earlier this week, I published a post I wish that I’d never had to write. It was about how Jeff Bezos — a man who clearly is a brilliant technology innovator and disruptor — and the massive company that he created, Amazon, have lost their way. For me and my law partner Barry J. Cooper Jr., the trigger was our own, still unresolved battle with the Seattle-based technology...

America has grossly undercounted its opioid-dependent babies. They deserve justice

A

They cry every night, and yet they are unheard — the hundreds of thousands of American babies born in this century to mothers hooked on opioids, a manmade crisis fueled by the greed of some of the nation’s biggest pharmaceutical companies. One reason that everyday Americans don’t know as much as they should about these children born into what the doctors call Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome...

In Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley,’ inaction makes a sick town even sicker

I

Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” is America’s worst-kept secret. I know this because I’ve been writing about the state’s perilous and often unsightly stretch of chemical plants, oil refineries and other industrial plants ever since I started this blog nearly a decade ago, aiming to call attention to a major public health hazard in our midst. My native state has one of the nation’s highest rates of...

A stunning case of kids, radioactivity and government neglect emerges in Ohio

A

In 2017, federal regulators from the U.S. Department of Energy testing the neighborhood around a 20th century uranium plant in Pike County, Ohio, made a startling discovery in the air near a middle school attended by hundreds of local children — traces of neptunium-237, an extremely radioactive particle, typically a by-product from nuclear reactors. But what happened next was even more...

Even $50 billion won’t bring back all of Louisiana’s lost wetlands

E

There’s good news and bad news when it comes to the effort to restore the massive amount of coastal wetlands — some 1,800 square miles, or one-and-a-half times the size of Rhode Island — that Louisiana has lost over the last 85 years, roughly around the same time period that Big Oil has been doing its business in the state. Aside from the loss of so much biodiversity in a state...

How natural gas poisoned a poor Alabama town

H

It’s been going on for decades — poor towns in the Deep South, often with a predominantly black population — getting dumped on, whether it’s by Big Oil or by chemical plants or by toxic-waste disposal firms. Many of my earliest cases as an environmental lawyer were in these off-the-beaten track places such as Brookhaven, Mississippi or Martha, Kentucky, where oil companies...

A new twist in the fight against ExxonMobil’s climate lies

A

The push is on to hold the world’s largest energy company accountable for decades of unchecked pollution and for its lies about greenhouse-gas pollution that have served as its unsteady foundation. The company in question is ExxonMobil, the fossil-fuel conglomerate known for setting world records for quarterly profits, raking in billions of dollars every month. With its secretive ways...

Protest at the Dakota Pipeline project is starting to pay off

P

People often wonder whether political protest is effective. Certainly, we live an era where our politicians seem to listen mainly to their big donors and to the large corporations, while the average citizen struggles to be heard. Still, even in an era when most people seem to spend most of their time glued to their smartphones, taking matters to the streets can actually work. Protestors have to...

It’s time to call off the dogs in North Dakota

I

Earlier this decade, it was the Keystone XL pipeline project that became the moral epicenter of the environmental movement in this country. And for good reason: the notion that the United States might allow a project to ship some of the dirtiest fuel — oil from the Canadian tar sands — across the American heartland, to meet the lucrative energy needs of overseas markets raised a...

The real environmental crime in places like Flint

T

The last couple of years have been rough for the environment. Fracking, oil spills, and, of course, climate change, which is frequently linked to floods and other natural disasters, have made negative news from the warm waters of the Gulf to the chilly climate of northern Canada. Inevitably, these events lead for a call that somebody be held accountable. This week, a New York Times op-ed made the...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
Cooper Law Firm

Follow Us

© Stuart H Smith, LLC