North Dakota’s Relaxed Pro Hac Vice Provision for Water Protectors Should Stay

The North Dakota Legislature clarified that it believes constructing pipelines matters more than protecting people’s right to peacefully protest when it passed legislation in January 2017 that increases penalties for and further criminalizes acts of non-violent resistance. The impetus for this batch of anti-protest legislation was the Standing Rock movement, in which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe brought attention to the Dakota Access Pipeline (“DAPL”) and thousands of people joined the resistance against DAPL’s construction. Since August 2016, over 700 people have been arrested from the DAPL protests, resulting in an unprecedented caseload for North Dakota’s South Central District Court. These cases involve a mix of legal issues, including mass arrests, civil disorder, conspiracy to commit reckless endangerment, indigenous Treaty rights, and environmental rights, among others. The unprecedented buildup and types of cases have made it very difficult, if not impossible, for local counsel alone to provide adequate representation for these water protectors. Special Provision for Adequate Representation In January 2017, attorneys petitioned the North Dakota Supreme Court for changes in North Dakota’s pro hac vice procedures (pro hac vice allows an attorney to legally practice in a jurisdiction where she or he is not licensed without committing unauthorized practice [read more]

A SLAPP From DAPL

Introduction Attempts to squash public advocacy through fictional complaints are fun to read, until the potential of them being taken seriously sets in. On August 22, 2017, in the Western Division of North Dakota, Energy Transfer Partners (“ETP”) filed a complaint against Greenpeace and other environmental nonprofits for racketeering in violation of RICO, defamation, tortious interference with business, and common law civil conspiracy, among other extraordinary counts. Essentially, ETP filed a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (“SLAPP”)—asserting that Greenpeace and the “enterprise” of environmental-advocacy organizations machinated the Standing Rock protests and propagated lies about the Dakota Access Pipeline (“DAPL”) to raise money for “sham campaigns.” ETP’s imaginative claims are aimed to intimidate and punish environmental organizations that aided Standing Rock protestors and to silence future demonstrations. Standing Rock Background The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has peacefully opposed DAPL’s construction since 2014 with a fact-based concern: oil pipelines leak, and constructing DAPL poses a health risk to the millions of people who drink from and use the Missouri River. ETP partially owns DAPL, which runs for over 1,000 miles, crossing through four states and hundreds of waterways, including the Missouri River. Without permission from the Sioux tribe, the U.S. Army Corps [read more]