Court Orders New Contribution Allocation In Turtle Bayou Superfund Site Litigation

摘要

A federal appeals court ruled June 8 that site valuation reports written in 1987 actually were excludable as protected settlement communications and should not have been used by the district court to estimate the volume of waste at the Turtle Bayou superfund site (Lyondell Chemical Co. v. Occidental Chemical Corp., 5th Cir., No. 08-40060, 6/8/10).rnThe U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a decision by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, holding that in allocating liability for work done at the site, the lower court had improperly relied on information prepared as part of settlement negotiations.