Opinion ID: 795431
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Applicability of New Castle County and Reading

Text: 52 To repeat, New Castle County and Reading stand jointly for the proposition that a PRP seeking to offset its cleanup costs must invoke contribution under § 113; the express cause of action under § 107 (cost recovery) is limited to governments and Indian tribes (acting in their enforcement capacity) and innocent landowners, and no implied cause of action for contribution for PRPs — under either § 107 or the common law — survived the passage of § 113. This rule, unless factually distinguishable, controls the case before us. 53 Recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided Consolidated Edison Co. of New York v. UGI Utilities, Inc., 423 F.3d 90 (2d Cir. 2005), which held that, despite a prior Second Circuit decision suggesting the contrary, a PRP has an implied cause of action for contribution under § 107. See id. at 100 & n. 11 (concluding that section 107(a) permits a[PRP] that has not been sued or made to participate in an administrative proceeding ... to recover necessary response costs incurred voluntarily, which the Court deemed consistent with the view that courts took of section 107(a) before section 113(f)(1) was enacted). The Second Circuit admitted that its earlier holding in Bedford Affiliates v. Sills, 156 F.3d 416 (2d Cir.1998) — which is substantively similar to our holdings in New Castle County and Reading — was inconsistent with this approach. Nonetheless, the panel decline[d] to answer the question whether a three-judge panel of this court may depart from Bedford Affiliates's ... holding. Consol. Edison, 423 F.3d at 101 n. 12. It noted that, as in New Castle County and Reading (but unlike in Consolidated Edison or this case), the plaintiff in Bedford Affiliates cleaned up its site pursuant to a consent order and sought relief under both § 107 and § 113. 54 Thus, the Court limited Bedford Affiliates to hold that a party that has incurred or is incurring expenditures under a consent order with a government agency and has been found partially liable [for contribution] under § 113(f)(1) may not seek to recoup those expenditures under section 107(a). Id. at 102. The Court concluded that its holding in Consolidated Edison — that a party that has not been sued or made to participate in an administrative proceeding, but, if sued, would ... be liable under section 107(a), may still recover necessary response costs incurred voluntarily — did not conflict with its understanding of Bedford Affiliates. Id. (emphases added). 18 55 DuPont would have us adopt this reasoning to distinguish New Castle County and Reading. It argues that, as in Bedford Affiliates, both of our prior cases involved PRPs that cleaned up sites pursuant to some form of EPA oversight. 19 Tracking the analysis in Consolidated Edison, DuPont asserts that New Castle County and Reading are fundamentally different from this case (where appellants cleaned up their sites voluntarily), because the rule in our prior cases may be limited factually to those circumstances where a PRP has already satisfied the prerequisites for § 113 contribution set forth in Cooper Industries. 56 We disagree. Although we will not dispute the Second Circuit's interpretation of its precedent, we do not read our precedents to be so limited. Nothing in New Castle County and Reading suggests that our holdings in those cases depended on the motivations for the cleanups. Indeed, we reached the § 107 and common law claims in those cases precisely because § 113 was not sufficient to dispose of the appeals. In New Castle County, for example, we noted that the circumstances of that case forced us to decide whether a PRP may seek cost recovery under § 107 (even if it would ordinarily qualify for contribution under § 113) because the respective statutes of limitations for the different types of claims meant that, on the facts of the case, a § 107 cost recovery action would have been timely but a § 113 contribution action would not. 111 F.3d at 1120. And in Reading, we necessarily considered whether any contribution claim (common law, implied in § 107, or express in § 113) could survive the discharge of a PRP's liability to the United States in a bankruptcy proceeding. We concluded that an express § 113 contribution claim was precluded by the fact that the Government's claim against the PRP was discharged by the PRP's bankruptcy, meaning there was no underlying action and thus other PRPs could not seek contribution from the debtor. Reading, 115 F.3d at 1126. We rejected the common law and implied cause of action claims because they were categorically precluded by the statute. Id. at 1117, 1120-21. 57 It is familiar law that when the rule in a prior case by its terms controls the outcome of a current case, we will not reach out to distinguish the prior case on the basis of factual differences that were not material to the earlier holding. As Judge Kozinski explained in Hart v. Massanari, 266 F.3d 1155 (9th Cir.2001), common law precepts require that a court confronted with apparently controlling authority must parse the precedent in light of the facts presented and the rule announced. Insofar as there may be factual differences between the current case and the earlier one, the court must determine whether those differences are material to the application of the rule or allow the precedent to be distinguished on a principled basis. Id. at 1172; see also United States v. Rosero, 42 F.3d 166, 174 n. 16 (3d Cir.1994) (refusing the defendants' invitation to distinguish an earlier case because the precedent was not materially distinguishable from the facts at hand); Black's Law Dictionary 629 (8th ed.2004) (defining a material fact as one that is significant or essential to the issue or matter at hand). Our holdings in New Castle County and Reading — based on our interpretation of the statute — are broad, and nothing in those cases suggests that the results would have been different if the plaintiffs had undertaken voluntary cleanups. 20 We do not, therefore, believe our precedents may be distinguished from this case as the Second Circuit distinguished Bedford Affiliates from the circumstances of Consolidated Edison. 58