The Boeing Company v. Maziar Movassaghi

We affirm the district court’s decision that a California law governing cleanup of a federal nuclear site violates the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity. Because we decide that the state law impermissibly regulates and discriminates against the federal government and its contractor, we do not reach the question of whether the federal laws governing nuclear materials and cleanup of hazardous substances preempted the state law. We need not reach Boeing’s Section 1983 claim for a declaratory judgment and an injunction.

FACTS

The federal government made and tested rockets, nuclear reactors, and various nuclear applications for war and peace at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory beginning shortly after World War II. When built in the 1940s, this lab was far from people, thirty miles from Los Angeles in Ventura County. Los Angeles grew, though, and now over 150,000 people live within five miles of the site and half a million people live within ten miles.

When the state law challenged in this case was promulgated, 452 acres of the 2,850 acre lab site were federally owned and managed by the National Aeronautics and Space Association (“NASA”). Most of the site, the…