The BP bankruptcy scenario

By Kate Sheppard There's growing frustration about the administration's response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with complaints that officials have been sluggish in demanding BP be more transparent and hesitant to criticize the company's inability to plug the well. The administration clearly faces a number of tough choices here with few right answers, but there's one area where it could be weighing in on specifics but haven't: the liability cap on oil spills.

As we all know Apple and Samsung have been fighting it out in courtrooms around the world. The big win so far for Apple has been the patent case in California. And that $1.05 billion award has just been slashed: District Court Judge Lucy Koh lowered the damages awarded to Apple by $450.5m, saying jurors had not properly followed her instruction in calculating some of the damages. The ruling reduced Samsung Electronics' bill to just under $599m.

Steven HorwitzOver at Reason this morning, Jesse Walker wonders what an empirical study of this policy, detailed in the New York Times, would suggest about the incentives facing oil companies:

NEW ORLEANS — A U.S. judge’s ruling Friday against BP Plc means the company can proceed with its appeal of the way a court-appointed administrator apportions payments for claims related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, some of which BP called “absurd.”

BP Plc and the lead lawyers representing victims of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill won approval of the economic and environmental loss portion of a proposed US$7.8-billion partial settlement of claims. The agreement resolves most private plaintiffs’ claims for economic loss and property damage related to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and subsequent spill. It doesn’t cover suits brought by the U.S. government and the states of Alabama and Louisiana over the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

(NEW ORLEANS) — Oil giant BP has agreed to pay a criminal penalty in the billions of dollars for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a person familiar with the deal said Thursday. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the deal, also said two BP PLC employees face manslaughter charges over the death of 11 people in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that triggered the massive spill.