Louisiana argues infrastructure law is about trespassing, not about free speech. The suit, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, challenges a 2018 revision to Louisiana’s critical infrastructure law on behalf of a group including property owners, activists, and a journalist who faced arrest under the law.
The group suggests that the law violates First Amendment rights and makes it a possible crime to be anywhere near any of Louisiana’s 125,000 miles of petrochemical pipelines, a network which runs through public and private land, much of it unmarked and underground.
Among the plaintiffs in the challenge, which was rejected in lower federal court, are a group of landowners who were arrested by police hired by a pipeline company as the property owners protested a section of pipeline that a state court found was improperly built through their own land.
The Bayou Bridge pipeline flows for more than 160 miles across sensitive river swamp habitat in Louisiana, the final link in a series of fossil fuel infrastructure projects connecting the fracked oil of the Bakken shale fields of North Dakota to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
Activists protested the pipeline, which was completed in 2019, arguing it would further exacerbate climate change, Louisiana’s coastal shoreline loss, and health issues in the state’s industrial “Cancer Alley.”. In Utah, where violators of an anti-protest law can face up to five years in prison, a lawmaker was quoted discussing the legislation as part of a larger campaign to push back against the climate movement, noting: “We’re being forced out of coal, which is cheap, reliable and plentiful, but have nowhere to go to find a replacement energy source because natural gas is also under attack.”.
