Stuart H. Smith

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

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Most lawyers would be intimidated by taking on the world’s most powerful and secretive company, the giant Exxon-Mobil Corporation. But Stuart H. Smith isn’t like most attorneys. With his expert knowledge about the kind of radioactive pollution caused by oil-and-natural-gas production, Smith knew how to show before a jury how the global oil giant had for years systematically dumped radioactive pipe – and in the process poisoned its unknowing blue-collar workforce – on one man’s property just outside Smith native city, New Orleans. And he and his partners made an audacious request: That the jury come back with a 10-digit verdict against Exxon-Mobil. But after hearing the case, Smith’s team indeed won a $1.056 billion judgment. Although later reduced somewhat by an appeals judge, it remains a record penalty for this type of case.

Stuart H. Smith has been one of America’s top environmental lawyers for more than a quarter-century, taking on not just Exxon-Mobil but Chevron, BP, and other large corporations that had harmed their neighbors and their workers with hazardous pollution. His success is reflected in the title of his autobiography: Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America – a book that award-winning documentarians Josh and Rebecca Tickell called “a true-to-life, nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat, hard-hitting David vs. Goliath thriller..”

Even a personal battle with cancer could not stop Stuart from his determination to tackle an array of complex cases, from taking on Big Pharma on behalf of the babies born to opioid abuse, to suing oil and gas companies and contractors for failure to follow environmental laws. Today, he is of counsel to Cooper Law Firm, and along with his Partner Barry Cooper, this New Orleans-based practice of plaintiffs attorneys is licensed to practice around the world and continue their fight for environmental justice and the protection of consumer rights in toxic torts and medical malpractice suits.

Smith has also been lead counsel on more than 100 oil pollution cases, which focus primarily on damages caused by the wastewater and sludges oil companies discharge into the environment. His first big case was groundbreaking – a lawsuit against the giant Chevron Corp. on behalf of workers at a Mississippi disposal yard who were exposed and in some cases sickened by exposure to radioactive debris on oil pipes. The case – which resulted in a favorable settlement for his clients – brought much needed national attention to the problems known within the oil and gas industry as technologically enhanced radioactive material (TERM), or naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM).

On April 21, 2010, Smith was flying his jet back to New Orleans when he saw the black plume of smoke from BP’s badly damaged and leaking Deepwater Horizon rig, out in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few years, he threw himself into seeking justice for the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of its worst environmental disaster. He worked with a team of experts that uncovered evidence that government and BP officials were downplaying the extent and the damage of the spill and published it on his popular environmental blog. As a lawyer, he fought for the interest of the Gulf’s commercial fishermen and numerous other clients.

Latest stories

The world is realizing that Jeff Bezos has lost control of Amazon

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These have been tough times for the world’s formerly richest man — Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos — and it has nothing to do with his divorce settlement that cost him a whopping $38 billion payout to his ex-wife McKenzie Bezos. I don’t care about Bezos’ private life and neither should you, but have you noticed that his public company is falling apart? Consumers, warehouse workers...

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

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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...

Radiation fears rock southern Ohio: ‘If you have half a thyroid, you’re doing good’

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First came the shock and the anger that the federal government had known about radioactive pollution at a middle school attended by their children and told no one for two years. But now the residents of Pike County, Ohio, are beginning to take stock of the possible impact that contamination from the government’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant has had on the health of their community, and they...

Hackers, ‘virtual assault rifles,’ and how Jeff Bezos has lost control of Amazon

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Has Jeff Bezos lost control of the giant tech monster that he created, Amazon? That’s what I’m starting to wonder after a series of beyond-unfortunate — and at times remarkable — events that my law partner Barry J. Cooper Jr. and I have had in dealing with the world’s largest online retailer. It all started with a computer hack, then escalated with the hackers’ purchase of thousands...

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

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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

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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...

New disclosure lifts lid on government cover-up of radioactive pollution in Ohio

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A surprise admission by a top federal administrator is raising some shocking new questions about how much that kids going to a nearby middle school and neighbors of a southern Ohio uranium-processing plant have been exposed to radioactive pollution during recycling efforts there since the start of the new millennium. Paul Dabbar, undersecretary of science for the U.S, Department of Energy...

Why the BP oil spill still matters after 9 years

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There wasn’t much fanfare in April when the 9th anniversary of the world’s largest-ever oil spill — the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that dumped more than 4 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico — came and went. Usually a 9th anniversary isn’t a big deal, after all. But the lack of attention might cause some folks to think the effects of America’s worst...

Trump’s DOE places a ticking nuclear time bomb at Hanford Site

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Calling the 177 containers at the Hanford Nuclear Site in south-central Washington state that contain high-level radioactive waste “tanks” is not a very good description. Each of these so-called “tanks” — buried in a kind of a farm of well-manicured dirt — is roughly the size of a four-story apartment building. Collectively, the 177 containers hold about 56 million gallons of some of...

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

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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...

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