Amorie Hummel

Assisted Ocean Wind, a subsidiary of the Danish company Ørsted, in the preparation and prosecution of its application to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities for the rights to build up to 1,100 megawatts of offshore wind power off the coast of New Jersey, resulting in an award of all 1,100 megawatts of capacity. This was the first offshore project of that scale to be awarded to any one offshore wind bidder in the United States (Ocean Wind I).

Assisted Cozen O’Connor’s environmental team in securing from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection the first-ever Nonattainment New Source Review construction permit for a soybean vegetable oil manufacturing facility in the United States on appeal to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board. The case was the first of its kind in the United States and centered on claims that the facility's air pollution controls were insufficiently stringent under Pennsylvania's Air Pollution Control Act and the federal Clean Air Act, Lowest Achievable Emission Rate requirements. The favorable decision sets the standard for air pollution control for vegetable oil manufacturing in the United States.

Assisted in securing a significant victory in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania on behalf of Allan Myers, LP, a non-union construction company that filed a bid protest with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) challenging a provision in a project solicitation requiring that all contractors execute a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) with local unions, hire labor through local unions, and be bound by the unions' collective bargaining agreements. PennDOT dismissed the bid protest, and we successfully appealed that decision, with the Commonwealth Court unanimously holding that the PLA violated Pennsylvania's competitive bidding laws and setting a new standard for the use of PLAs. This is the first case in which a Pennsylvania court has not upheld a PLA.

Successfully defended a major agribusiness company, in a two-day arbitration, against a claim that it failed to pay approximately $600,000 (plus $200,000 in interest) of an annual steam fee to the steam provider for its soybean processing plant, and won a counterclaim against the provider for recovery of approximately $200,000 in erroneous payments.

Won a motion for reconsideration that resulted in the client's dismissal from a Superfund case which originally named more than 1,000 defendants. The client was the first to be dismissed from the case with prejudice without settling. After initially securing dismissal of a joint and several liability claim under CERCLA Section 107, the court agreed to reconsider a portion of the decision allowing a Section 113 claim to proceed, acknowledged factual error, vacated a portion of the prior opinion, and dismissed the client from the action with prejudice.

On behalf of a major national company with a wide range of institutional customers and management responsibilities, prepared a comprehensive, fact-based analysis of disinfection products and methods appropriate for responses to the virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. The analysis is based on reviewing the available guidance from a range of governmental and other sources. This thorough evaluation of the hundreds of products approved by EPA for use against this virus addresses the active ingredients, application processes, selection of products for specific settings (e.g., schools, food establishments) and is relied on throughout the company's operations.

In a defamation lawsuit pending for nearly a dozen years, we secured a seven-figure jury verdict awarding punitive damages to our client, climate scientist Professor Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. The verdict was reached after a four-week trial in the District of Columbia against an adjunct scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and a writer for the National Review. Professor Mann was a lead author of groundbreaking research in the late-1990s, which demonstrated a sharp increase in northern hemisphere temperatures linked to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The research, which came to be known as the "Hockey Stick" graph, subsequently was replicated and extended by other research teams and now is considered settled science. Professor Mann filed his defamation suit in 2012 after the defendants published blog posts asserting that he had falsified his Hockey Stick research and calling him "the Jerry Sandusky of climate science" who "molested and tortured data." The verdict is noteworthy because it involved a case of climate science disinformation and demonstrated that the "actual malice" test established by New York Times v. Sullivan to safeguard First Amendment rights is not unattainable when there is clear and convincing evidence of conscious avoidance of objective facts suggesting falsity.

Secured a favorable American Arbitration Association award on behalf of a nationally recognized environmental remediation firm concerning responsibility for a leaking wastewater pipe beneath a TSCA-regulated cap. Following a four-week arbitration hearing, involving four expert witnesses and multiple fact witnesses, our client prevailed and was awarded attorneys' fees and costs in excess of $1.5 million.