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Maryland Climate Liability Rejection
Coverage from Courthouse News Service, Dechert, and others
Maryland's high court has sharply narrowed local climate-liability lawsuits, ruling that Baltimore, Annapolis, and Anne Arundel County cannot use state tort law to pursue damages tied to global fossil-fuel emissions.
The dominant pattern is judicial resistance to local climate nuisance and failure-to-warn claims when they are framed as attempts to regulate interstate or international emissions. The material is cohesive and current, with little historical spillover beyond earlier filings and related national litigation. The main uncertainty is how far this reasoning will extend to other states and to the U.S. Supreme Court review of related cases.
The core holding is the same, but the current version sharpens the framing: Maryland’s court is now described as barring state-law climate damages because the suits amount to regulating global emissions, with added emphasis on federal preemption and jurisdictional limits. It also more clearly situates the case within ongoing Supreme Court review of similar climate-liability disputes.