EPA v. Calumet Shreveport Refining, L.L.C.

Majority — Thomas

Joined by: Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Jackson

The majority held that the relevant "action" for venue purposes is each individual EPA denial of a single refinery's exemption petition — not the omnibus Federal Register notices EPA used to bundle multiple denials together — because the Clean Air Act defines EPA's authority by reference to each individual petition. Since each denial applies only to one refinery in one location, those denials are "locally or regionally applicable" actions, and EPA cannot manufacture national applicability simply by packaging many local decisions into one notice. However, the majority then found that the "nationwide scope or effect" exception applies because EPA's two core justifications — its legal interpretation of "disproportionate economic hardship" and its economic theory that fuel compliance costs are fully passed on to consumers — are conclusions that apply across the entire country regardless of any refinery's location. The majority reasoned that these nationwide conclusions were the primary driver of EPA's decisions, with refinery-specific reviews serving only to confirm that no individual refinery had a reason to overcome the presumption EPA had already established. Because EPA also published a formal finding that its actions rested on these nationwide determinations — as the statute requires — all conditions for routing the cases to the D.C. Circuit were satisfied.

Dissent reasoning

The dissent agreed with the majority that each individual EPA denial is a "locally or regionally applicable" action, not a nationally applicable one. However, the dissent argued that the majority's approach to the "nationwide scope or effect" exception is a mistake. In the dissent's view, the Clean Air Act's substantive provisions — not a judge-made weighing test — determine when EPA must make a "determination of nationwide scope or effect." When Congress wanted EPA to base an action on a nationwide determination, it said so explicitly in the relevant substantive provision; the small refinery exemption provisions contain no such requirement, calling only for refinery-specific evaluations. The dissent further argued that the majority's test conflates the reasons EPA uses to support a decision with the formal "determination" the statute requires, and warned that the resulting multi-step framework — requiring courts to read hundreds of pages of agency reasoning, sort local from national justifications, and weigh which set was the true "driver" — will make venue disputes unnecessarily complicated and expensive to resolve. The dissent would have sent the case to a regional circuit by simply reading the relevant substantive provision, which calls for no nationwide determination.