White Hat v. Landry

The federal district court for the Western District of Louisiana denied summary judgment to pipeline protesters who asserted that a Louisiana law that prohibited “unauthorized entry of a critical infrastructure” was facially unconstitutional and unconstitutional as applied. A 2018 amendment to the law expanded the definition of “critical infrastructure” to include pipelines. The protesters were arrested in 2018 during a protest involving the Bayou Bridge Pipeline but were never charged. As an initial matter, the court denied the district attorney’s motion for summary judgment on the issue of the plaintiffs’ standing. The court found that even though the district attorney had disavowed prosecution of the plaintiffs and the statute of limitations had run, the plaintiffs still possessed standing to the extent enforcement of the law chilled their future protest activity. The court further ruled, however, that both the facial and as-applied First Amendment challenges to the law failed. The court found that to the extent the statute reached protected expressive conduct, it was not content-based, and that the law satisfied the Supreme Court’s O’Brien test for content-neutral restrictions. In addition, the court rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that the statute was unconstitutionally vague in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

In a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Louisiana criminal statute that identified pipelines as critical infrastructure, the federal district court for the Western District of Louisiana ruled that organizational and landowner plaintiffs lacked standing but allowed plaintiffs who had been arrested while protesting construction of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline to proceed with their claims. Although the court found that at least some of the organizational plaintiffs had alleged injury-in-fact with allegations that included specific examples of members being charged with misdemeanors or threatened while protesting near pipelines as well as allegations of the organizations’ involvement in organizing pipeline protests, the court concluded that none of the organizations or their members had alleged causation or redressability since the alleged injuries did not pertain to protest activities under the enforcement and prosecutorial authority of the remaining two defendants. With respect to the landowner plaintiffs, who had granted permission for the arrestee plaintiffs to protest on their property, the court found that neither the landowners’ allegations regarding their concern about environmental and health impacts in communities affected by the Bayou Bridge Pipeline and about threats posed by climate change nor their allegations that the law limited their use and enjoyment of their property satisfied the injury-in-fact standard. The court also ruled that the claims against the former sheriff of St. Martin Parish were not mooted by the fact that he no longer held the office; instead, since he was sued in his official capacity, his successor should be substituted. The court also concluded that the Younger abstention doctrine did not apply because there was no ongoing state proceeding in which the arrestee plaintiffs could challenge their prosecution.