Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
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524US1

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UNITED STATES v. BESTFOODS

Opinion of the Court

here that dual ofﬁcers and directors made policy decisions
and supervised activities at the facility. The Government
would have to show that, despite the general presumption to
the contrary, the ofﬁcers and directors were acting in their
capacities as CPC ofﬁcers and directors, and not as Ott II
ofﬁcers and directors, when they committed those acts.13
The District Court made no such enquiry here, however, dis-
regarding entirely this time-honored common-law rule.

In sum, the District Court’s focus on the relationship be-
tween parent and subsidiary (rather than parent and facil-
ity), combined with its automatic attribution of the actions
of dual ofﬁcers and directors to the corporate parent, errone-
ously, even if unintentionally, treated CERCLA as though it
displaced or fundamentally altered common-law standards of
limited liability.
Indeed, if the evidence of common corpo-
rate personnel acting at management and directorial levels
were enough to support a ﬁnding of a parent corporation’s
direct operator liability under CERCLA, then the possibility
of resort to veil piercing to establish indirect, derivative lia-
bility for the subsidiary’s violations would be academic.
There would in essence be a relaxed, CERCLA-speciﬁc rule
of derivative liability that would banish traditional standards
and expectations from the law of CERCLA liability. But,
as we have said, such a rule does not arise from congres-
sional silence, and CERCLA’s silence is dispositive.

2

We accordingly agree with the Court of Appeals that a
participation-and-control test looking to the parent’s supervi-

13 We do not attempt to recite the ways in which the Government could
show that dual ofﬁcers or directors were in fact acting on behalf of the
parent. Here, it is prudent to say only that the presumption that an act
is taken on behalf of the corporation for whom the ofﬁcer claims to act is
strongest when the act is perfectly consistent with the norms of corporate
behavior, but wanes as the distance from those accepted norms approaches
the point of action by a dual ofﬁcer plainly contrary to the interests of the
subsidiary yet nonetheless advantageous to the parent.