US litigation team achieves dismissal for Marathon Petroleum subsidiaries in putative class action lawsuit

A team of litigators from Norton Rose Fulbright defended subsidiaries of Marathon Petroleum Corporation—Tesoro High Plains Pipeline Company, LLC and affiliated entities (collectively referred to hereinafter as "Tesoro")—in a five-year putative class action lawsuit that the court dismissed with prejudice on August 8, 2023, ruling in favor of Tesoro and denying plaintiffs' request for damages.

In October 2018, the named plaintiffs, nearly 50 individual members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara (MHA) Nation, filed a putative class action lawsuit against Tesoro on behalf of about 400 MHA members. They asserted various causes of action centered around the alleged trespass by Tesoro's operation of its pipeline on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota due to the alleged expiration of a right-of-way.

Norton Rose Fulbright filed a motion to dismiss on various grounds, including failure to exhaust administrative remedies, failure to join an indispensable party that could not be joined, failure to state a judiciable federal common law trespass claim, and lack of subject matter jurisdiction.

On April 6, 2020, the District Court granted the firm's motion to dismiss on exhaustion grounds. The plaintiffs appealed to the Eighth Circuit, which reversed and remanded the case on September 13, 2021 back to the District Court and ordered it to be stayed until the Bureau of Indian Affairs took further action in administrative proceedings that Norton Rose Fulbright is also handling (and in which the firm previously obtained reversal and vacatur of a US$187M decision against Tesoro for the alleged trespass).

The case remained stayed for nearly two years until June 8, 2023, when the court lifted the stay and ordered supplemental briefing regarding whether the plaintiffs, as individual Indians, had any federal common law claim for trespass.

On August 8, 2023, the court issued its opinion, dismissing all of the plaintiffs' claims with prejudice. The court agreed that the individual Indians do not have a federal common law trespass claim, and therefore failed to state a claim. The court also dismissed the plaintiff's breach of contract claim, including because plaintiffs were not parties to the right-of-way agreement at issue.  Finally, the court dismissed plaintiffs' remaining claims because they were dependent upon the failed trespass claim. 

The Norton Rose Fulbright team was led by Jeff Webb (San Antonio) and included Mark Emery and Dave Kearns (Washington, DC). The lawsuit was styled Civ. No. 1:19-CV-00143; JoAnn Chase, et al v. Andeavor Logistics, L.P., et al; in the United States District Court for the District of North Dakota.