American Tort Reform Association
A 40-year corporate campaign to restrict liability — now aimed squarely at climate suits.
§ 1 · Background & fossil-fuel ties
The 40-year-old American Tort Reform Association, or ATRA, coordinates corporate efforts to restrict civil liability, damages awards, class actions, product liability suits and access to courts. ATRA says it was founded by the American Council of Engineering Companies and joined soon afterward by the American Medical Association. It describes itself as a nationwide coalition of companies, trade associations, professional firms, and state-based tort reform organizations. It is organized as a 501(c)(6) business league, not a public charity.
Its central strategy has been to lobby for state and federal laws that restrict or reshape corporate liability, building state-level “lawsuit reform” coalitions, running PR campaigns portraying courts and juries as hostile to business, and filing amicus briefs supporting corporate defendants. A 1996 Public Citizen investigation reported that ATRA worked closely with the public-relations firm APCO Associates to manufacture grassroots support for liability restrictions that tobacco companies wanted while concealing the real powers behind the movement and the true beneficiaries. According to the report, “The primary backer of the campaign, the American Tort Reform Association, includes several major tobacco companies, and the brains behind ATRA, APCO Associates, has a long history of working for Philip Morris.”
This history is relevant because climate-accountability cases consciously draw on legal lessons from tobacco litigation: alleged internal scientific knowledge, public misrepresentation, deceptive marketing and shifting the resulting public costs back to the companies involved. By at least the 2010s and early 2020s, ATRA had adapted its traditional mass-tort message to fossil-fuel litigation.
ATRA used to publish a “sample list” of members but removed the page sometime after 2015. At that time, the sample list, published as an exhibit in a July 2015 court filing, included ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, National Fuel Distribution (a natural gas distribution company), Koch Industries Inc., Caterpillar (a major supplier of equipment and engines to extractive industries) and CSX (historically a transporter of large amounts of coal and petroleum products). Corporate giants like Philip Morris, Dow Chemical, Exxon, G.E. Aetna, Geico, and Nationwide have all supported ATRA, according to the Center for Justice and Democracy at New York Law School.
Exxon’s own 2023 corporate advocacy disclosure lists a payment to the American Tort Reform Association of between $10,000 and $24,999 that is categorized as supporting “civil justice reform.” The modest contribution is particularly significant given that ExxonMobil is one of the defendants that ATRA is supporting in the Suncor case with ATRA having filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court. ATRA’s amicus brief says that no outside entity other than ATRA, “its members, or its counsel” financed the brief. It does not disclose whether ExxonMobil is currently an ATRA member or whether member dues supplied any portion of the resources used for the filing. ATRA has had ExxonMobil and Koch-connected lawyers in its leadership. In addition, the Leonard Leo-linked Concord Fund, operating under the name Judicial Crisis Network, has also donated to ATRA, according to Desmog.
§ 2 · Record of fronting
Neither ExxonMobil alone nor any other company controls ATRA. But the organization repeatedly serves as an industry-facing intermediary, including for fossil fuel companies, by converting the liability interests of identifiable corporate supporters into ostensibly broader arguments about civil-justice policy. In a 2022 report, ATRA described investigations and lawsuits concerning oil company climate representations as a coordinated campaign to “destroy the U.S. oil and gas industry” by activists, foundations, journalists and plaintiffs’ lawyers. It criticized the investigations commonly known as the “Exxon Knew” cases and argued that climate plaintiffs were using litigation to accomplish environmental policy objectives. Not a word was written about how fossil fuel companies themselves funded advocacy organizations, trade associations and PR campaigns casting doubt on climate science and climate policy.
ATRA also filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court supporting fossil fuel defendants seeking review of Honolulu’s climate deception lawsuit alleging that companies misrepresented and concealed the climate consequences of their products. ATRA has also filed in litigation involving Louisiana local governments and oil-company liability, including Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish. ATRA itself groups the Louisiana and Boulder filings together as efforts to stop state-law suits against energy companies. ATRA’s recurring litigation strategy is to describe lawsuits alleging concealment, misrepresentation, failure to warn, nuisance and local damage as if the plaintiffs were directly asking state courts to regulate worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. That reframing serves fossil-fuel defendants because a direct judicial emissions cap would face stronger federal preemption and separation-of-powers objections than an ordinary state claim for damages caused by deception or wrongful conduct.
Boulder argues that Exxon and Suncor knew about the danger of climate change and misled the public about those risks, so the companies should be responsible for the damage. Exxon and Suncor argue they are not responsible for climate change and should not be responsible for its consequences.
§ 3 · The cover story, debunked
In the Boulder lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor, ATRA argues that the local governments have disguised an attempt to establish national environmental and economic policy as a collection of state-law tort claims.
Boulder is not asking the court to establish an emissions ceiling, allocate national emissions or order the defendants to stop producing or selling fossil fuels. It seeks damages and other relief under Colorado law for alleged local harms, through claims including public and private nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment and civil conspiracy. The possibility that a damages judgment could affect business practices nationally does not, by itself, transform a state tort action into federal economic regulation.
ATRA argues that federal law exclusively governs, and preempts, state-law claims seeking damages attributed to climate change.
American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, one of ATRA’s principal authorities, did not hold that all state-law climate claims are preempted. It held that the Clean Air Act displaced federal common-law nuisance claims seeking court-imposed emissions restrictions. The Court expressly left the availability of state-law claims to be determined under the Clean Air Act’s preemptive effect. ATRA reads AEP more broadly than its express holding.
ATRA argues that “climate change is not a tort” (a civil wrong, other than a breach of contract, for which the law allows an injured person to seek compensation or another civil remedy from the party that caused the injury) and that state law provides no mechanism for recovering climate-related costs.
Boulder does not claim that climate change itself is a tort. It alleges that particular defendants engaged in conduct giving rise to recognized state-law claims, including nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment and civil conspiracy.
ATRA argues that the lawsuits seek to impose “unprincipled liability” on companies providing lawful fossil-fuel products, regardless of fault, causation or whether the elements of a tort are satisfied.
A product’s lawful status does not categorically immunize its manufacturer or seller from liability for separate wrongful conduct. Lawful products such as cigarettes, properly prescribed opioids, asbestos-containing products and lead paint have generated liability when plaintiffs proved actionable concealment, deceptive promotion, failure to warn, defective design or nuisance. The lawfulness of fossil fuels may be relevant to particular claims, but it is not a complete defense to independently unlawful conduct.