SCOTUS Catch-all |

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Justice Thomas unironically began a concurrence with this:

I join the Court’s opinion in full. I write separately to highlight the problems that arise when judges create atextual legal rules and frameworks. Judge-made doctrines have a tendency to distort the underlying statutory text, impose unnecessary burdens on litigants, and cause confusion for courts. The “background circumstances” rule—correctly rejected by the Court today—is one example of this phenomenon.

I trust you, Clarence. You are a world-historical paragon of text-distorting, court-confusing, burden-imposing problems.
 
nycfan said:
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1. The Supreme Court had to overrule a truly baffling decision by the 11th Circuit, which seems just incoherently cobbled together. They read the statute incorrectly to eviscerate all exceptions to the FTCA, but that rule would be favorable to plaintiffs. Of course they didn't want THAT, so they created out of thin air a "Supremacy Clause" defense in which the government can prevail if it shows that the officers' conduct (i.e. storming into a house, guns blazing) has "some nexus with furthering federal policy and can reasonably be characterized as complying with the full range of federal law."

That's of course a nonsense consideration. The whole thing is simply weird. That's not how the Supremacy Clause works. But to an aspiring dictator, it's manna from heaven. Sure, the officers committed all sorts of intentional torts, but as long as they were "furthering federal policy" it's OK. Does that sound like anything we've heard recently? You know, "furthering the president's agenda"?

2. So it might come as a surprise that two of the three judges were . . . Trump appointees. Psych. One was Supreme Court shortlister and overall incompetent "judge" Lagoa, who was clearly auditioning for a promotion. The other was just an undistinguished white dude who hates gay people and got the nomination so that he could sit there forever. Ha, joke will be on them when we cancel the circuits and reconstitute them . . .

Actually the only surprise was that a Biden nominee joined that abomination of an opinion. She's finishing up her second year in the job. Maybe she hasn't found her footing yet? I guess there's a weird 11th Circuit precedent from two years ago, but pretty sure the holding in the case is inapposite so it wasn't binding.

3. Anyway, few things depress me more when judges make basic and fundamental mistakes that we wouldn't tolerate from law students. The Supremacy Clause says that federal law is the supreme law of the land. The 11th Circuit seems to think it does the same thing for every federal policy or enforcement action. So if a state law gets in the way of a federal policy, they think the state law must yield.

It's impossible to overemphasize the ignorance required to reach this holding. It's not only that the Supremacy Clause is clear on its face. It's also that we have a doctrine of field preemption, which outlines the special circumstances in which federal policy can preempt state law -- namely, if Congress intended to "occupy the field" so that Congressional choices about what NOT to regulate have preclusive effect over states that want to regulate. If ever there was a statute not intended to occupy the field, it's this one -- with about 11 exceptions, and then 6 exceptions to the exception, several of which refer expressly to state law, and none of which even purport to displace state law since it's a statute about when the government waives its sovereign immunity.

It's ALSO that we have an anti-commandeering doctrine rooted in the 10th Amendment, which states that federal law cannot conscript state officials into enforcing federal law. That doesn't apply directly, but obviously it would be contradicted by any rule in which a federal desire for state assistance would preempt the state's refusal to provide it.

But how could the 11th Circuit have known it was wrong? Maybe they were just reading the statutes a little more aggressively than I am. Let's see -- oh, every circuit that has ruled on the question came out the other way, with all but one of them unanimous? And now the Supreme Court unanimously overturned?

4. There should be a rule that if you're an appellate judge, and you sign onto a ruling that contradicts every other appeals court and then gets unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court, you need a one year timeout, at a minimum, to pull your head out of your ass.
 
Meanwhile, I'll thank Gorsuch for including this bit of color in explaining why the 11th Circuit's reliance on an old case called Neagle was misplaced. Man, the court system in the late 19th century was both wild and shockingly corrupt. There are so many stories of cases where the Supreme Court just refused to let one party win, no matter what it took. Anyway:

To appreciate why that view is mistaken, a little history helps. In re Neagle involved an affair, a homicide, and a habeas petition. In 1883, Sarah Althea Hill claimed to be the wife of U. S. Senator William Sharon and sought a share of his fortune in acrimonious California divorce proceedings. Sharon admitted an affair but insisted that Hill had forged the pair’s handwritten marriage contract. Hill hired David Terry to represent her. A former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Terry had resigned that post after killing (another) U. S. Senator in a duel. As the litigation wore on, lawyer and client married. Eventually, the dispute between Hill and Sharon wound up before U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field while he was riding circuit.

Terry and Justice Field were no strangers, having served together on the California Supreme Court. Even so, Justice Field issued a devastating ruling against Hill. As he announced his decision, Hill leapt from her seat, denounced the Justice as “bought,” and had to be carried from the courtroom. Joining the fracas, Terry punched a marshal and brandished a bowie knife. Even after the couple spent time in jail for contempt, they continued to issue threats against Justice Field. Those events found their way into the U. S. Reports this way. Aware of the threat Hill and Terry posed, the U. S. Attorney General ordered Deputy Marshal David Neagle, a former chief of police in Tombstone, Arizona, to accompany Justice Field when he next rode circuit in California. That decision proved prescient, for Terry soon cornered the Justice on a train and attacked him. Intervening to protect the Justice, Neagle shot and killed Terry.

After the shooting, California authorities arrested Neagle and began prosecuting him for murder. Neagle countered by filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court seeking his release. When Neagle’s petition reached this Court, it agreed the writ should issue, reasoning that the Supremacy Clause shielded him from state criminal charges. Without some such protection, the Court concluded, California could frustrate federal law by prosecuting a federal marshal “for an act which he was authorized to do by the law of the United States,” an act “which it was his duty to do,” and in circumstances where he “did no more than what was necessary and proper.”

So anyway, the Supreme Court's decision about the Supremacy Clause was sort of silly, but they had to do something because literally a former state Supreme Court Justice tried to kill one of the Justices, and then convinced California to indict the bodyguard (well, not him, but surely his allies). The bodyguard who was accompanying the Justice while he was sitting, because of legitimate death threats against the Justice.
 
nycfan said:
Catholic Charities, though, says it qualifies because its disability services are motivated by religious beliefs and the state shouldn’t be making determinations about what work qualifies as religious. It appealed to the Supreme Court after Wisconsin’s highest court ruled against it. President Donald Trump’s administration weighed in on behalf of Catholic Charites.…”
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Hmmm. So if the state can’t determine it, who can?
 
BlooVooDoo said:
Hmmm. So if the state can’t determine it, who can?
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It's a bit more subtle than that. The state can determine it, but it has to do so properly. Here's how Sotomayor described the lower court holding:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court disagreed, holding that petitioners are not “operated primarily for religious purposes” because they neither engage in proselytization nor serve only Catholics in their charitable work.

I believe WI court was just following the statutory terms; it's an old statute. Anyway, that is quite obviously to me a plainly insufficient and discriminatory test of religious purpose. It was probably pushed by the exceedingly conservative WI Synod of the Lutheran Church, who never helped anyone outside their immediate church (according to my grandfather who lived and preached in WI as a member of the MO Synod of Lutheran Church) and thus had nothing to fear from that distinction.

Anyway, a Catholic charity that provides food assistance to poor families of any creed or faith is clearly religious in nature. All Justices agreed. Sometimes the cases heard by the Supreme Court are correcting horrific fuckups by lower courts. Most of the unanimous ones are.
 
lawtig02 said:
Seems like this could have enormous implications for this error-riddled ICE crackdown.
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Maybe. But since all other circuits were doing it the right way, and only the 11th went off on this exceedingly bizarre tangent (Lagoa!) I'm not sure how much practical import it will have.
 
superrific said:
It's a bit more subtle than that. The state can determine it, but it has to do so properly. Here's how Sotomayor described the lower court holding:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court disagreed, holding that petitioners are not “operated primarily for religious purposes” because they neither engage in proselytization nor serve only Catholics in their charitable work.

I believe WI court was just following the statutory terms; it's an old statute. Anyway, that is quite obviously to me a plainly insufficient and discriminatory test of religious purpose. It was probably pushed by the exceedingly conservative WI Synod of the Lutheran Church, who never helped anyone outside their immediate church (according to my grandfather who lived and preached in WI as a member of the MO Synod of Lutheran Church) and thus had nothing to fear from that distinction.

Anyway, a Catholic charity that provides food assistance to poor families of any creed or faith is clearly religious in nature. All Justices agreed. Sometimes the cases heard by the Supreme Court are correcting horrific fuckups by lower courts. Most of the unanimous ones are.
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Sounds straightforward. Thx for the explanation. Maybe WI should just do away with the exemption and make everyone pay unemployment taxes.
 
BlooVooDoo said:
Sounds straightforward. Thx for the explanation. Maybe WI should just do away with the exemption and make everyone pay unemployment taxes.
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Or they could do it like other states. Now, I don't know how other states do it, but obviously well enough to avoid this kind of embarrassment.
 

Supreme Court justices get snippy as key decisions loom​



“… When Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered excerpts of a recent decision on environmental regulation from the bench, he segued into a zealous policy-driven admonition about government “delay upon delay” and the consequences for America’s infrastructure.

… Days later, when Justice Clarence Thomas joined a unanimous job-bias ruling, he penned a separate opinion that included an extraneous footnote decrying DEI. “American employers have long been ‘obsessed’ with ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives and affirmative action plans,” he wrote, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and referring to a brief from America First Legal Foundation, founded by Stephen Miller, now a top policy adviser to President Donald Trump. “Initiatives of this kind have often led to overt discrimination against those perceived to be in the majority.”

And last week, when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s decision giving the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to Social Security Administration data, she stepped back and juxtaposed lower court judges’ handling of Trump litigation with that of the conservative high-court majority.

She variously described the lower court judges as “hard at work”; engaged in “thorough evaluations”; and issuing “well-reasoned interim judgments.” The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, on the other hand, “dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them.”…”
 
nycfan said:

Supreme Court justices get snippy as key decisions loom​



“… When Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered excerpts of a recent decision on environmental regulation from the bench, he segued into a zealous policy-driven admonition about government “delay upon delay” and the consequences for America’s infrastructure.

… Days later, when Justice Clarence Thomas joined a unanimous job-bias ruling, he penned a separate opinion that included an extraneous footnote decrying DEI. “American employers have long been ‘obsessed’ with ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives and affirmative action plans,” he wrote, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and referring to a brief from America First Legal Foundation, founded by Stephen Miller, now a top policy adviser to President Donald Trump. “Initiatives of this kind have often led to overt discrimination against those perceived to be in the majority.”

And last week, when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s decision giving the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to Social Security Administration data, she stepped back and juxtaposed lower court judges’ handling of Trump litigation with that of the conservative high-court majority.

She variously described the lower court judges as “hard at work”; engaged in “thorough evaluations”; and issuing “well-reasoned interim judgments.” The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, on the other hand, “dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them.”…”
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… [in a decision in the NLRB termination case earlier this Spring], Chief Justice Roberts shepherded the court’s action in the case, as the majority issued an order that allowed Trump to remove, at least for the time being, the two board members who’d begun the dispute. The majority then specifically added language to exempt the Federal Reserve.

The exception – superfluous to the legal issue at hand – appeared to respond to the political atmosphere [Trump was publicly criticizing Powell] and possible criticism that the court’s action was endangering the Federal Reserve and US economy.

Justice Kagan called out the majority’s move as a reaction to the politics of the day.

In a dissenting opinion joined by the two other liberals, Kagan condemned the majority for favoring “the President over our precedent” regarding the removal of agency heads. (A 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, limited the president’s ability to fire such independent officers.)

“If the idea is to reassure the markets,” Kagan wrote, “a simpler – and more judicial – approach would have been to deny the President’s” appeal for immediate relief.

“Because one way of making new law on the emergency docket (the deprecation of Humphrey’s) turns out to require yet another (the creation of a bespoke Federal Reserve exception).””
 
nycfan said:
She variously described the lower court judges as “hard at work”; engaged in “thorough evaluations”; and issuing “well-reasoned interim judgments.” The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, on the other hand, “dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them.”…”
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Hard to argue with that.
 
Sorry for the long post but I thought this was an interesting write-up from the NYT's email this morning. I'm not at all suggesting I think Barrett will prove to be a Souter or anything like that, but anything that gets under Alito's skin is good by me.


Author Headshot
By Jodi Kantor
I’m an investigative reporter focused on the Supreme Court.
Two years ago, while reporting a story about how the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion, I discovered something surprising about Justice Amy Coney Barrett. In a secret internal vote about whether to hear the case, she had voted no.
This was unexpected. President Trump appointed Barrett to cinch a 50-year conservative legal revolution. A mother of seven, she is on the record as an abortion opponent. And she voted for the ultimate verdict in Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning the federal right to abortion.
But her initial reluctance about the case was a clue that Barrett is a more independent figure than the stalwart that many on the right or the left believed her to be. With much of Trump’s agenda headed to the court eventually, she’s not necessarily the safe vote he wants. She is the Republican appointee who has voted most often against Trump’s position.
I spent this spring interviewing Barrett’s friends and colleagues as well as people from the court; examining her many years of speeches; and, with the help of scholars, analyzing her voting record. Read the full story. Here are some of the things I learned.

Leftward drift​

Barrett is changing, and a new analysis of her record shows how. She has become the Republican-appointed justice most likely to be in the majority in decisions that reach a liberal outcome.

oakImage-1749845093209-jumbo.png​
Source: Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, Washington University in St. Louis; and Michael J. Nelson, Penn State | Note: Data includes nonunanimous decisions that were orally argued and signed | By The New York Times​
Or take cases in which liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan voted together. In Barrett’s first term, she was aligned with them only 39 percent of the time (this was in nonunanimous cases for which the justices heard arguments). This term she was aligned with them 82 percent of the time.
But Justice Barrett is still very conservative. She helped end federal affirmative action and expand gun rights. When she breaks for the liberal side, it’s rarely in a marquee case.

Opposing Trump​

So far, Barrett’s record on Trump-related votes is short but suggestive. Usually, justices show what scholars call “appointment bias,” leaning slightly in favor of the presidents who install them on the bench. Emergency orders are tentative, and not every vote is disclosed. But she has gone in the other direction.
Trump has privately complained about her, according to two people familiar with his thinking. On a podcast this spring, Mike Davis, a close Trump ally who once clerked for Justice Neil Gorsuch, tore into her in such crude terms that Gorsuch later called to reprimand him, according to people aware of the exchange.

Differences with a colleague​

Differences between Barrett and Justice Samuel Alito arose in her earliest days on the court. In the first major argument she heard, he tried to expand the role of religion in public life. She declined to go along. Next, he wanted to overturn the Affordable Care Act; she voted no on procedural grounds. Alito wanted to hear the abortion case, and she didn’t. In a patent case later that term, they wrote dueling dissents both claiming that Justice Scalia would have favored their positions.
For five years, that debate has continued about how far and how fast to go. Alito, 75, is in a hurry to take advantage of the six-seat conservative majority. Barrett, who at 53 is likely to have a long future at the court, is cautious and controlled. He barely disguises his annoyance when the other conservatives don’t go along with him, and he sometimes vents in epically long opinions.
After Barrett’s second term, her agreement on outcomes with Alito slid from 80 percent to 62 percent.

A justice without a team​

On the court, Barrett sits somewhat apart from the others. Her signature move is joining only slices of her colleagues’ opinions, agreeing with some bits but not others. Even when she agrees with the supermajority, she sometimes argues some of the justices took the wrong route. (One person from the court called her the Hermione Granger of the conservatives, telling the men they’re doing it wrong.)
Barrett, a longtime academic, initially wasn’t sure she wanted to be a judge. She still calls herself “a law professor to my bones.” Among the nine members of the court, she is the least experienced judge and the youngest. The one justice not educated at Harvard or Yale, she is a foreigner to the power-player Beltway posts that shaped most of the others.
In speeches, she has told striking, and sometimes personal, stories about family, faith, the law and the enormous transition she has been through.
 
SCOTUS opinions are typically released on Mondays and Thursdays. That means we have four more "typical" days this term -- 6/19, 6/23, 6/27, and 6/30. They can add more dates, of course, and they can also go past 6/30. But we should expect to get a lot of important decisions in the next 2-3 weeks, including in these cases, summaries courtesy of oyez.org --

  • A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, Independent School District No. 279​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Rehabilitation Act of 1973 require children with disabilities to satisfy a “bad faith or gross misjudgment” standard when seeking relief for discrimination relating to their education.

  • Department of Education v. Career Colleges and Schools of Texas​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether the Higher Education Act of 1965 permits the assessment of borrower defenses to repayment before default, in administrative proceedings, or on a group basis.

  • Environmental Protection Agency v. Calumet Shreveport Refining, LLC​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether challenges by small oil refineries seeking exemptions from the requirements of the Clean Air Act’s Renewable Fuel Standard program should be heard exclusively in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit because the agency’s denial actions are “nationally applicable” or “based on a determination of nationwide scope or effect.”

  • Esteras v. United States​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether a court may, in considering whether to revoke an individual’s supervised release and impose a prison sentence, consider factors from the law governing sentencing not mentioned in the supervised release law.

  • Food and Drug Administration v. R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co.​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether a manufacturer may file a petition for review in a circuit where it neither resides nor has its principal place of business, if the petition is joined by a seller of the manufacturer’s products that is located within that circuit.

  • Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether a Texas law that requires any website that publishes content one-third or more of which is “harmful to minors” to verify the age of each of its users before providing access should be subject to “rational basis” review or “strict scrutiny.”

  • Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

  • Gutierrez v. Saenz​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether a Texas death-row inmate has standing to sue the state over its refusal to give him access to DNA testing pursuant to a law permitting DNA testing only when the person can prove that he would not have been convicted if the DNA testing produced exculpatory results.

  • Louisiana v. Callais​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-Black congressional district constitutes unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, even when drawn in response to a federal court finding that the state’s prior single majority-Black district likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

  • Mahmoud v. Taylor​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether public schools burden parents’ religious exercise when they compel elementary school children to participate in instruction on gender and sexuality against their parents’ religious convictions and without notice or opportunity to opt out.

  • Martin v. United States​

    A case in which the Court will decide (1) whether the Supremacy Clause prevents individuals from suing the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act when federal employees’ actions, even if negligent or wrongful, are related to carrying out federal policy and can be interpreted as following federal laws; and (2) whether the discretionary-function exception, which usually protects the government from being sued for certain decisions made by its employees, is always inapplicable when dealing with claims related to law enforcement officers’ actions that fall under the intentional torts category?

  • Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether the Medicaid Act’s “any qualified provider” provision unambiguously confers a private right upon a Medicaid beneficiary to choose a specific provider.

  • Oklahoma v. Environmental Protection Agency​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has exclusive jurisdiction to review an Environmental Protection Agency action that affects only one state or region, simply because the EPA published that action alongside actions affecting other states in a single Federal Register notice.

  • Parrish v. United States​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether a party who files a notice of appeal during the period between when their original appeal deadline expired and when the court reopens their time to appeal must file a second notice after the reopening is granted.

  • Riley v. Bondi​

    A case in which the Court will decide issues relating to the 30-day deadline to seek review of a ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals denying withholding of deportation.

  • Rivers v. Guerrero​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether 28 U.S.C. § 2244(b)(2)—which strictly limits the circumstances in which an inmate can file a second petition for federal post-conviction relief—applies to all second habeas petitions (petitions filed after the first one) or only to specific types of second petitions.

  • Stanley v. City of Sanford, Florida​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a former employee—who was qualified to perform her job and who earned post-employment benefits while employed—loses her right to sue over discrimination with respect to those benefits solely because she no longer holds her job.

  • Trump v. CASA Inc.​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether a district court can issue a nationwide (universal) injunction that blocks enforcement of a federal executive order—in this case, an executive order that purports to eliminate birthright citizenship—beyond the specific parties involved in the lawsuit.

  • United States v. Skrmetti​

    A case in which the Court will decide whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,” violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

    ​

 
lawtig02 said:
Sorry for the long post but I thought this was an interesting write-up from the NYT's email this morning. I'm not at all suggesting I think Barrett will prove to be a Souter or anything like that, but anything that gets under Alito's skin is good by me.
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This is a bunch of hype. I've noticed that ACB seems to be singing a different tune than the other reactionaries but it's on the same album. I can't think of a decisive vote she has cast in an important case. Maybe there's one. Her concurrences? Yeah, Kav writes a bunch of concurrences too. Or used to, until people started figuring out that he was full of shit in them.

And I'm not sure Lee Epstein's analysis takes into account the worst thing that's happened in the past six months: the Supreme Court's decision to stay basically any lower court judgment against Trump except the most egregious due process issue. Those stays are more impactful than any opinion.
 

Supreme Court adds two new cases for next term​


www.scotusblog.com

Supreme Court adds two new cases for next term

The Supreme Court on Monday added two new cases to its docket for the 2025-26 term, both involving efforts to litigate disputes in federal rather than state courts. In a […]
www.scotusblog.com www.scotusblog.com

“The Supreme Court on Monday added two new cases to its docket for the 2025-26 term, both involving efforts to litigate disputes in federal rather than state courts. In a list of orders released from the justices’ private conference last week, the court announced that it will hear arguments next term in cases arising from New Jersey’s attempt to investigate a group of crisis pregnancy centers and from efforts to hold oil companies responsible for production of crude oil in Louisiana more than 80 years ago.

In First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin, the court agreed to decide whether a group of crisis pregnancy centers – faith-based nonprofits that hold themselves out as healthcare clinics and often provide material support to pregnant women, but try to persuade them not to have an abortion – can go to federal court to challenge the constitutionality of a subpoena from a state attorney general, or whether they must instead pursue those claims in state court.

…
And in Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, La., the Supreme Court agreed to hear a long-running lawsuit brought by Louisiana and two of its parishes, attempting to hold oil companies liable for their production of crude oil in the state during World War II. The question that the court agreed to decide arises from the oil companies’ latest efforts to transfer the cases from state court, where they were filed, to federal court.

The oil companies relied on a federal law that gives federal courts the power to hear civil actions against “any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States” “for or relating to any act under” the authority of that office. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that although the oil companies may have been “acting under” an officer of the United States when they fulfilled contracts to supply the federal government with gasoline for aviation, their production of crude oil did not “relat[e] to” their contracts to refine the oil into gasoline because the contracts did not specifically address oil production. …”
 
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